Portraits of Poets

March 04, 2015

About twenty years ago in Nashville, when Philip Levine was Vanderbilt University’s visiting writer, there was a Burger King on 21st Avenue South, at the edge of the college’s magnolia-fringed campus. It had a large parking lot that butted up next to a place called San Antonio Taco, where Vanderbilt students lined up to buy galvanized buckets of long necked beers on ice to ease down their guacamole tacos and buffalo wings. The parking lot belonged to Burger King, but SATCO customers often parked there.

Nowadays, Panera Bread (which has replaced the Burger King) employs a large, male security guard festooned with handcuffs and a police baton to patrol the lot, making sure the spaces reserved for Panera customers go to Panera customers. But back in 1995, Burger King had a sole female employee performing that job. Anyone who’s spent time around college students can tell you it’s dangerous to get between them and their beer. So it was not unusual to see this woman – in her late fifties, early sixties – running out of Burger King in her brown polyester BK uniform, a matching kerchief flapping around her neck, a matching cap bobby-pinned to her dyed blond hair. Like a lot of people who do these kinds of jobs, she was a good employee, and took her work seriously. To discourage the students from parking where they wanted to park, she sometimes shook a rag at them, sometimes she just called out. Overwhelmingly, (of course) they ignored her. When she wasn’t trying to chase off illegal parkers, her duty was picking up trash. You’d have thought anyone could see it was a miserable job, and taken pity. Still, it was a job, right? And in 1995, she must have been making $4.25/hour – minimum wage at that time – $170/week if she worked full time. Some of the students called her the Burger Bitch. I just hope she never knew…

As it happened, my colleague and best-friend-of-Vanderbilt Creative Writing, Vereen Bell, sometimes had a cup of coffee and did a little last minute paper grading in the Burger King before crossing the street to class. It was convenient, cheap, quiet. It’s hard to describe Vereen: somewhere in his late 70s now, he’s an iconic figure at Vanderbilt where he’s taught for more than half a century, he’s pretty much transformed the English Department from its midcentury roster of white-men-teaching-white-men into the lively, diversified department it is today. (Read about Vereen here)

In the English Department, we were thrilled when Phil won the Pulitzer Prize for The Simple Truth on April 18, 1995. He actually took the call in his office with his door open. Vereen was in his office, across the hall, ready with a bottle of bourbon. I was in an office just a few doors down – brand new to Vanderbilt, taken aback by its surface formality and the constraints of a conservative campus culture. “Please be quiet,” warned a placard hung in the hall outside the department. “Voices can be heard from within.” I’d never been part of an English Department where talking was discouraged…

As soon as Phil confirmed he had won (“Yes. Isn’t it sweet?” he said to my colleague, Mark Jarman.), I watched in astonishment as various faculty and staff rushed up and down the hall, arms full of liquor bottles, or wrapped around trash cans, commandeered as ice buckets. Soon, a full blown party was underway in the Department’s Duncan Library. What I remember best is the expression on Phil’s face – bemused, pleased, still something a little bit held back (maybe because Franny wasn’t there). I read later that he said, of the Pulitzer, “If you take it too seriously, you’re an idiot. But if you look at the names of the other poets who have won it, most of them are damn good.” His face reflected those split emotions that afternoon.

Well, what does this have to do with the Burger Bitch, her miserable job, and her pathetic little life picking up trash and chasing drunk college students out of Burger King’s parking lot?

Just this: when Phil gave a poetry reading at Vanderbilt later that semester, Vereen Bell introduced him. The reading was packed. When it was time, Vereen unfolded his tall frame and made his way to the podium. In his slow-paced and garrulous manner, with his soothing, south Georgia accent, he began to talk, bypassing entirely the impressive literary credentials of Philip Levine. He told, instead, the story of the Burger Bitch, how he had started talking with her one day as she went about her trash-dumping duties.

“She came and sat down at the table with me,” he said. “She told me what her job was, and how hard it was, how difficult it was to get the students to listen to her.

“Then she asked me what my job was. ‘Well,’ I said, feeling a little embarrassed, ‘I teach over there at the college.’ She brightened up right away. ‘You do?’ she answered. ‘Then would you do something for me?’ ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Would you please tell those girls not to laugh at me because of my job?’”

In the audience, our own laughter, our wry smiles, the subtly self-congratulatory atmosphere we’d created around ourselves of having a Pulitzer Prize winner on faculty dissipated instantaneously.

For a few seconds – and I will never forget the feel in the room – Vereen let us sit in that.

And then he said, “Maybe you wonder why I’m telling you this story. Well, it’s because it’s the best way I can I can think of to introduce Philip Levine. He understands how that woman who works in the parking lot at Burger King feels about things. And he writes poems about it.”

Now, that introduction – so astonishingly apt, so unique in American poetry – has become Phil’s epitaph…

Kate Daniels is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University. Her most recent book is A Walk in Victoria’s Secret (LSU: 2011). It includes “Crowns,” a poem she wrote for Philip Levine.

February 10, 2015

Is it possible to know someone you’ve never met, someone who has been completely invisible to you in the flesh but has marked your life in an indelible way? This is my question in regards to the poet Paul Violi, a man I’ve never seen in person but one I’ve come to know through his Selected Poems and the descriptive, warm, and love-inducing stories shared by others who knew him for a long time or perhaps only shared a moment in his presence.

By the time I arrived in New York City, Paul had already passed away. I was studying in The New School’s MFA program, and his name was frequently heard throughout the writing classes and at poetry readings. Mysterious to me then, the goal soon became to figure out who he was as a writer and person, about his teaching style, and the way he viewed the world through an “an ever-widening hour, / where fountains in the rain / half frozen, half music, / shine with a dim dream of the sun.”

Many have written about Paul’s unusual influence; their stories are posted on this blog, and others are embedded in various writings. Memories of Paul circle around themes of gratitude, warmth, and sheer amazement at the poet’s unique capabilities. Those who sat in Paul’s classes tell of his intense focus during conversations, his generosity as both a sincere listener and a speaker who elicited “clarity drawn from darkness / song from thought.” One young man, who knew Paul only through writing, recounts how he reached out to the poet about a possible collaboration. Paul responded to his inquiry and suggested that the two have dinner. He later sent him several of his books, all in the spirit of goodwill and connection. I’m thinking of these lines from “One for the Monk of Montaudon:”

For it’s a pure and simple joyto eat and drink with those I love,to stay late and celebrate a few certaintieswhile confusion and scornand a few other crazy, weather-beaten guestscontinue to roll across the cold floors

I love this idea of sharing a meal to fight back some of life’s crazy. It seems to be an authentic and real solution, to break bread and enjoy one another’s company amidst all our joys and difficulties. Yet, it also seems to be a rare thing in today’s world.

This was Paul’s mode of operation, though. He found happiness in connecting with others. Earlier in “One for the Monk of Montaudon,” the poet explains:

And I’m glad of a chance to meet people,like Miss Ohio(“five foot nine, eyes that shine”),if for no other reason than the pleasure of shaking hands or the opportunityof leaning into the distanceswhile a strand of smoke lingers, and rises,and turns like an unheard but legible desire.

In these moments we lean into the distances with Paul. We meet others; we meet him. His scenes help us gain a tiny eye and an enlarged heart for what’s going on around us, the people whose lives are intersecting with our own.

Whether on a construction site, in a Nigerian village, or somewhere in his own thoughts, the poet’s life serves as an example of joie de vivre. In another posted tribute (there are dozens), one reader tells about the time Paul ran into the freezing North Sea wearing only his underpants, simply because the water was there and he was alive. This reminds me of his vibrant poems from Harmatan, which relay Paul’s experiences in Nigeria while serving in the Peace Corps.His work, life amongst the people, and keen observations come marching before us, instructing us to hop on the motorcycle behind him as two packs of wild dogs attack from the bush, “leaping over the handlebars, / all fangs and spit flying in strands”. There’s an intense uncertainty here, “alarm still ringing in your head,” and we question how the poet will navigate the rest of our ride.

As we think of poems, like “Index,” we see the writer splurging on language, venturing into what interests him most, things he's appreciating in the moment, the paths he questions, and even items that some of us might initially consider dull. For Paul, all of life was a poem waiting in the wings, a chance to put thoughts to paper, to expand his understanding through iterations and imaginings. Selected Poems is a memorial of the poet’s mind in motion, one that bares its musings – all of the things that can happen in an hour, the loves and losses, the knowable observations, and the darker uncertainties. His lines can bring us back to the surface, as they prompt, “Is life all you know?” Such questions remind us to breathe, to think beyond our ever-present worries. And we need these reminders, especially when we find ourselves disavowing our life’s work three times in the same day (see “Index” again).

Continuing to turn pages in Selected Poems, we see just how seriously Paul took the poetic possibilities within any situation. Poem after poem demonstrate his deep curiosity of small moments in time. It’s as if an idea twitches ever so slightly, and then the poet traces the thread, nourishing additional thoughts and fictional exploration. He takes it into something much larger and more imaginative.

So what has the poet-scholar taught us on our first day of class? If we’re willing participants, we see that there is always something on the other side. Violi left the door open for connection and further questioning. The hour widens as we sit with him, contemplating both light and weighty things, all of which seem weightier by the end of our time together.

Selected Poems will continue to transmit the teacher’s voice. I’m reminded that “it’s a good day / when the wind is pure sensation” and I can stretch out with the writing before me, meeting the poet who hummed each line, breathed each thought. At the beginning of his day, I can almost see Paul stepping out of his house in Putnam Valley, his teacher’s bag full of students’ papers and his comments. It’s early in the morning. He puts one foot past the threshold and calls forth any new or unusual thing. He’s asking someone or something to cross his path, to make itself known in a small or quiet way, and he’s smirking ever so slightly.

This week we celebrate Paul Violi’s life as a friend, poet, and teacher. On behalf of David Lehman and The New School’s Writing Program, we invite you to attend a special night honoring the poet. Please join us this Wednesday, February 11 at 6:30pm at The New School’s Wollman Hall (65 W. 11th Street). Find more information here.

Alex Bennett received her MFA from The New School in 2013. Her work has appeared in the Sosland Journal, The Best American Poetry Blog, the New School Writing Program blog, Insights Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at Parsons.

February 06, 2015

Kristina Marie Darling: I have always admired the way that your texts exist in spite of, beyond, and against traditional genre categories. Your work has the denseness and lyricism of poetry, with gorgeous and fractured narratives surfacing and resurfacing. In many ways, you question genre boundaries while appropriating the conventions of existing literary genres, a project that's wonderfully ironic and subversive. To what extent do you see genre categories as gendered? Are there larger power structures in the literary community, and in the academy, that dictate genre boundaries? Is writing against them and beyond them a feminist act?

Molly Gaudry: I’m wrapping up my coursework now as a PhD candidate at the University of Utah, where I’ve been spending a lot of time interrogating everything I thought I knew about genre. Is it multi-genre or mixed genre? Are these different from hybrid texts? Or non-genre texts? Do generic boundaries even exist, and, if so, where do they most rigidly appear and why? Is a crossover an invasion, a breach, a misstep, a test? Is it always transgressive? Or is it an attempt to erase, blur, break down walls? To what extent can the common reader learn to accept and appreciate that these boundaries and borderlines are, and have always been, invisible? I am struggling to answer these questions for myself.

I read something interesting recently in an anthropology essay about liminality. “Vermin” was used as a metaphor for boundary crossers. Rats and other critters that sneak into our homes, where they don’t belong, have breached the social contract. They are pests that must be taken care of, must be returned to their place. I’ve been thinking about this a lot with regard to so many invisible boundaries socially constructed around us. The metaphor works for just about any marginalized individual, group, or social structure that attempts to move. I’ve only just begun to wonder about the broad-spectrum potential of what more play in literature might mean, what might come of more widespread generic boundary crossing, because if we can learn to be more willing to allow these shapes and forms to shift and mutate then perhaps we’ll be less rigid in other areas of our lives, too.

I’d like to continue to talk about "feminist acts.” When did you first begin to recognize, in your own work, your feminist investments?

KMD: I definitely agree that writing against genre embodies many forms of resistance, since it is often those in power who delineate genre categories. And it's frightening how these generic categories shape cultural production and the ways that we inhabit language.

I first began to recognize my feminist investments as an M.A. candidate in continental philosophy at the University of Missouri. Many of my colleagues were working within the analytic tradition, and their work drew heavily from logic and the sciences. I was immediately struck by the strict genre conventions that bound their work, and as a result, their thinking, and what was possible within their writing. Research papers always came in preferably five sections, with a clearly worded claim, a tripartite argument, and extensive footnotes. Either that, or the papers didn't make it to conferences, didn't get published, and couldn't be used as writing samples. I admired the mental discipline of these philosophers, but it was difficult not to notice one thing: out of twenty or so students in my year, I was one of two women enrolled in the program. It became cognizant of the fact that one must have access to training, and forms of writing, in order to take part in this particular conversation. And women were frequently denied access to those academic forms of writing, and the training needed to inhabit them with confidence.

In part as a result of my work in philosophy at the University of Missouri, I became interested in rendering these academic forms of writing more inclusive. My work often takes the form of footnotes, appendices, and indices, which are often filled with decidedly non-academic content (including autobiographical writing, aestheticized language, etc.). It seemed problematic to me that these academic forms of writing privilege what have always been hailed as masculine values: logic, rationality, and a scientific mindset. In many ways, my work is a small effort to carve a space for the feminine within academic forms of writing.

MG: I’m really interested in your desire to carve space for the feminine within academic forms of writing. I like to think that my own writing is “feminine,” and I feel that it is (in a Marguerite Durasian kind of way, which is quite complicated and problematic in many ways). Still, I would like to have a better idea of what I actually mean when I say, or feel, that the “feminine” is part of my overall project. I love how you say that you’re claiming the spaces of footnotes, appendices, and indices, and feminizing these constructs. I wonder how you feel about the body of the work, traditionally privileged as the primary space of the text. How important is it to you to claim it for yourself? Or, conversely, to what extent would you want to reject it? What does it mean to you to rethink and reenvision these secondary spaces, like footnotes, which traditionally function to support the primary text, or even tertiary spaces, like appendices and indices?

KMD: That’s a great question. For me, the desire to privilege the body of the work over marginalia reflects many of the implicit hierarchies within language. I’m very interested in what happens when the hierarchies are reversed, when the margins become the main text. In this sense, I suppose I am claiming the main text for myself, but in other ways, I’m trying to redefine what we think of as the main text, to shift the reader’s attention to things that currently only occupy the periphery of their field of vision.

Some readers could certainly see this use of form as a feminist statement about women’s voices being pushed to the margins, but I’m more intrigued by what is possible within those marginal spaces. When the individual subject is (socially and formally) marginalized, they have nothing left to lose, and there is a kind of freedom in that. They are not burdened by the pressures of inhabiting the main text, as they do not have to create a narrative arc, a logical sequence of events, or speak in a way that we recognize as legible. For me, this reversal of main text and marginal text affords the possibility of working outside of accepted ideas about logic, coherence, and narrative structures. It is a subversion of not only hierarchies imposed upon language and various types of cultural texts, but it is a subversion of reason itself. I think this is why I’m so drawn to academic forms of writing. They represent our definitions of logic and legibility, but also the structures of power and authority, and the social inequities, that our ideas about reason give rise to.

With that in mind, I'd love to hear more about the relationship between your life as an academic and your wonderfully experimental work. In what ways do your scholarly interests intersect with your creative work? To what extent do you find your creative work resisting, or reacting against, aspects of academic culture? I'm thinking of the strange genres one must learn and make oneself fit into (like the job letter), as well as the connection (even though we all try to deny it) between these academic genres and structures of power and authority....

MG: I love what you said there about being intrigued by what is possible within marginal spaces and not being burdened by the pressures of inhabiting the main text. There really is a freedom in that, isn’t there?

I’m about to begin my last-ever semester of being a full-time student. I’ll be taking Lance Olsen’s Experimental Forms, and I’ll be sitting in on Melanie Rae Thon’s Narrative Theory and Practice. Both of these professors used the word “liminality” in their syllabus, and between now and the end of the semester I hope to have a much stronger grasp on what this means and how it might be applied to the literature I’m most drawn to as a reader, and how it applies to my own work, which I hesitate to call “experimental.” It’s interesting, actually: before the PhD, I would have used the word “experimental” quite freely, but I’m a lot more cautious with it now. This is a result of Michael Mejia’s fiction workshop, during which I began to wonder to what extent we might generally think of “innovation” as the goal or successful outcome of “experiment” (and perhaps it is the experiment, then, that is our most valuable practice). I’m not sure, though, that I’m ready to call my own work experimental (and if it’s not an experiment, then it’s not by this logic innovative), because although it may look illegible on the page, it still privileges characters’ psychological logic-making abilities, and, as a result, it is concerned with overall legibility and accessibility. In short, I write novels. I inhabit the main text. I work hard to create narrative arcs and characters with deep psychologies. All I am doing is reshaping the novel form, which is nothing new, if we consider the novel’s history to be monstrous and all-devouring, and so to turn to poetic forms that predate novels and recall even older traditions seems in some ways backward-looking as opposed to forward-looking. I don’t know. What do you think?

KMD: I'm fascinated by your definition of the experiment as a text which strives for innovation. So much of the time texts are lauded as experimental when they simply reproduce familiar structures of thinking and writing. But I think that there's more to innovation than just the text. For me, part of innovation is the relationship a text creates between the artist and his or her audience. Many of the books that I consider the most innovative, or the most experimental, imagine the story, or the poem, or the novel as a collaborative endeavor, in which the reader participates actively in the process of creating meaning from the work. This collaborative relationship between reader and writer, text and audience is something that the Lit Pub represents for me (and of course, your novels represent this as well). I think that your work is especially fascinating in that it prompts us to re-imagine the boundaries between text and reader, and between self and other. The text, or the magazine, or the press, represents not just a message or an overarching narrative, but a community. This is innovative, in my opinion, because it privileges process over product, allowing one to exist in a constant state of becoming.

In this respect, I think that we have a lot in common as publishers and cultural producers. I see my small press, Noctuary Press, not as a group of texts, or a project with an overarching message, but rather, as a forum for a dialogue. Noctuary Press is a starting point, a touchstone for conversations about what constitutes genre, the dangers of genre categories, and the gender politics inherent in our definitions of genre. I love being surprised by reviewers' interpretations of Noctuary Press books, as well as creative responses and collaborations that our books have given rise to. Pank Magazine published a wonderful creative engagement with Carol Guess's F IN, a review by J/J Hastain, which is a wonderfully innovative text in its own right. And I'm always happy to hear about our texts being taught in creative writing classes.

With that in mind, I'd love to hear more about your work with the Lit Pub. How did you envision your contribution to the publishing landscape initially? How did this vision change shape after you had started publishing?

MG: I’m interested in what you say about the relationship between writer, text, and audience. I’m thinking of Iser’s field of play, and where we as authors attempt to position readers, from page to page, or even from line to line, particularly with ergodic texts like yours, privileging rhetorical metalepsis, paratext, and even parody (or reclamation) of paratextual spaces. And texts that, in both of our cases, play with readers’ desires to fill in narrative gaps, what’s left untold and unsaid (and where, and why). So even as focalization may not be first and foremost on my creative agenda, it’s definitely there in the process of struggling with the creation of a text that problematizes both overreading and underreading, even as I (think I) privilege voice.

As for Noctuary Press and Lit Pub — actually, let me just jump in here first and further praise j/j hastain as an inspired writer and critic — I see Lit Pub, as you see Noctuary, as a starting point. Where you say Noctuary offers up a starting point for dialogue, I add that Lit Pub is a starting point for authors, a launching pad for careers on the rise, a place for mostly first books to emerge. Previous titles do influence what the catalog has room for in the future, which means I’m always looking for something new, something the catalog doesn’t yet offer. In this way, there is room for dialogues about the texts, but what those conversations may be surprise even me from book to book, author to author.

Actually, this brings up another point I’d like to talk about — you are a powerhouse in terms of your own academic and creative achievements alone, but add to these your literary citizenship, your press’s and authors’ contributions to the contemporary literary scene, and the countless awards, residencies, and fellowships you’ve earned, and I have to ask you a question I’ve often been asked: How do you do it all? And a followup I’m rarely asked: How do you balance your public and personal lives?

KMD: Thank you for your kind words about my work and Noctuary… It definitely means a lot coming from a writer as accomplished as you! I think your questions are great, too, and professionalization is something that definitely doesn’t get talked about enough in graduate school.

I do get asked from time to time how I’m able to go to residencies, publish books, etc., especially at a relatively young age. My answer tends to be very anti-climatic and unpopular. Most graduate students enter an MFA or a PhD program and feel an intense pressure to professionalize once they start the program. But I started sending out work when I was in eighteen years old, and started applying for residencies and fellowships when I was an undergraduate. In retrospect, this was a good thing to do, because once I entered a graduate program, I didn’t have to learn the forms of academic and professional writing (like artist statements, cover letters, and project proposals). I already had application materials ready to go. Now applying for residencies, fellowships, and other opportunities seems manageable, since it’s a fairly familiar process. The practice I had early in my career really helped.

But this doesn’t mean that I’m a good planner, or that I look ahead. I took a poetry workshop when I was an undergraduate at Washington University and it just ran away with me. I loved everything about it and couldn’t wait to be part of the poetry community. I wanted to start reviewing books, going to residencies, and meeting other poets right away. I’m still very engaged in the literary community, and it’s out of sheer love for what I do every day. And how many doctors and stock brokers can say that?

In terms of balancing personal and professional lives, I don’t think the two can really be separated. Many professional opportunities have led to great friendships. For example, I met Carol Guess when I was promoting my book, Melancholia, and now consider her a friend and terrific mentor. I met my friend and collaborator, Max Avi Kaplan, at a residency at Vermont Studio Center (something that I saw as a purely professional opportunity at the time). I really believe that if you love what you do, you will love the people you encounter, so it’s never really been a challenge to balance personal and professional lives. I do wish, though, that I had a few more hours in every day.

While we’re on the subject of literature and community… I’ve always seen you as someone who is an exemplary literary citizen, contributing exciting work while giving back to others and supporting projects you believe in in multiple ways (publishing, promoting, collaborating). How did literary citizenship begin for you? How did you see yourself in relation to a larger community when you began writing, and how did that relationship you envisioned change over time?

MG: That’s a really nice way to look at the intersection between the professional and personal. As for my own literary citizenship, it really came into focus for me in 2008, when I read Blake Butler’s blog post, “Where did Lucy purchase her new vagina?” Overlooking the problematic title, I offer that the post itself is a call to action, a list of to-dos anyone can do. I’m not sure if I was already editing online journals before that post, but I know I felt empowered when I read it, and I always trace my own service back to Blake’s. He served as a model for me, back in 2008, and inspired my own writing and my ideas of why I should be engaged with others’ writing.

And, to answer your question: when I first began writing (as a creative writing major at the School for Creative and Performing Arts, the nation’s only public K-12 school of the arts), I wasn’t even thinking about publication, for instance. Even as I made my way into an undergraduate English major, I was pretty intensely focused on the work (arrogantly so, at that), and I’m not sure I even knew a larger “writing community” existed. I probably had some conception of the “publishing industry” existing solely of Cheever types, and that, if lucky, maybe a young writer would get a story in The New Yorker followed by a Random House book deal. It really wasn’t until after my early interactions with Blake and others in the online community that my perception of what writers, and writing, and publishing could be — truly, an interconnected network of readers and writers of all ages everywhere exemplifying the best attributes of the spirit of from-the-ground-up, community-focused, Internet-enabled grassroots culture-shifting movements.

February 05, 2015

Julie Babcock's stunning first collection of poems, Autoplay, offers spare, carefully crafted lyrics that are as familiar as they are uncanny. By invoking the seemingly tame imagery of Midwestern cities, the poems in this striking collection lull the reader into a sense of complacency, only to skillfully undermine this expectation that they will encounter a familiar narrative. As the book unfolds, Babcock excavates violence, discontent, and enchantment from beneath an unremarkable exterior—marked by "the green hills of the gold course," "baby-sitters," and "breath against the mirror"—restoring a sense of both danger and wonder to everyday life. In doing so, Babock offers the reader a perfect matching of form and content, particularly as her stylistic dexterity illuminates and complicates the content of the work itself.

With that in mind, Babcock's use of received literary forms to deliver unexpected content is particularly impressive. She draws a parallel between inherited modes of writing (of which couplets, tercets, and quatrains are only a few examples) and the Midwestern cultural landscape, suggesting that both have been made to seem inhospitable to creative endeavors, but can give rise to stunning imaginative work if we allow them to. She writes in "Ohio Apologia,"

A twin can never divide her wealth.

I planned to go where I'd never melt into a mold of virgin or slut. I wanted to love you to love myself.

I crossed the rivers with my bag of stealth my story line revised and trussed, but a twin can never divide her wealth.

Here Babcock simultaneously inhabits a traditional literary form and received ideas about femininity, suggesting that one can work within these bits of inherited culture to expand what is possible within them. In much the same way that the speaker herself is "twinned," her story line is "revised and trussed," suggesting the inherent instability of both literary traditions and narratives of identity. Autoplay is filled with beautifully crafted poems like this one, which offer a carefully constructed relationship between style and content.

Along these lines, I found Babcock's use of domestic imagery compelling and provocative, especially as she suggest the violence inherent in being confined to a given place. She creates a wonderful tension between the confines of formal poetry and the volatility of the images contained within these formally pristine edifices, suggesting the inevitable discontent with one's origins. Consider "Autoplay,"

I am the baby-sitter. She is snuggled so close we might be one. We hear a noise and flee the house. "We're safe," I say, as we jump on the outdoor trampoline. Double somersaults of fear...

For Babcock, a particular place entails not just mere surroundings, but specific gender roles, modes of communication, and narratives of identity. In much the same way that the speakers' voices are contained within neatly presented tercets, couplets, and pantoums, the violence inherent in narratives of place is also subsumed within these orderly forms. What's fascinating about this tension between style and content is the way that Babcock subtly suggests that conflict, and contradiction, can reside beneath a seemingly un-rippled surface. Like many of the poems in Autoplay, this piece is as beautifully crafted as it is self-aware. This is a stunning debut, and Babcock is a poet to watch.

February 04, 2015

KMD: I've truly enjoyed reading all three of your books, and was intrigued by the dream-like quality of the poems in Arco Iris. They seem at once ethereal and carefully grounded in concrete imagery, rendering everyday things (like coffee, used electronics, and the sky above) suddenly and wonderfully strange. Along these lines, many of the poems take place in an unnamed tropical location, which for the reader, is both anywhere and nowhere, a tangible place place and a psychological one. With that in mind, I'd love to hear your thoughts about the relationship between travel, the literary arts, and the human psyche. What does travel make possible within your writing practice? And within conscious experience?

SV: That's interesting. I don't think of Arco Iris as dreamlike or unspecific. It's actually named a few times as South America-- many regions in South America-- a continent my partner and I traveled for a few months about nine years ago. The book is, in my experience of it and my intentions for it, a kind of anti travel-poetry. Or a rejection of the trope of travel (especially of the white traveler going to a brown place to have a "writing experience" or to buy themselves an authentic transformational experience or etc.). It is a book in which I can't write or think myself out of a scenario in which my movement in the world (as a white American, especially) is not complicit with neoliberal violence and/or globalism and its many layers and types and shades of (economic, racial, political, physical...) violences. I wonder if the ethereal experience you had of it was what I felt to be the spellcasting of capitalism--you try to say something against capitalism, it is immediately appropriated as a product of capitalism (and neutralized?), ad infinitum.

But along those lines, after having read your Music for another life and Vow-- I'd love to ask--what do the ethereal, the dreamlike, the bride, and the book mean for you in those collections? And perhaps related, do you understand or do you think through your work on a book-by-book level, or a poem-by-poem level, or as a group of books together, or...?

KMD: That's a great question. I've always thought of reading as a kind of travel, in which one is carried from consciousness as we know it into a kind of dream state. For me, the physical object of the book facilitates this transformation, this dreaming as much as the work itself.

As much as I hate to admit it, it all begins (for me at least) with the book's cover, as well as its size, texture, the way it feels in the hand. It is for this reason that I love to be very involved in the design of my books. When Max Avi Kaplan and I co-wrote Music for another life, we actually typeset the entire book, designed the cover, and selected the cover image from within the collaboration, presenting it to the publisher as a finished, fully-realized product.

My approach to the book as a physical object emerges, in a lot of ways, from my approach to poetry manuscripts. For me, each manuscript is really one long poem, an entire world unto itself. With both Vow and Music for another life, the book as object was merely an extension of the project, the world I had envisioned within the text itself. I think that we tend to overlook the many ways that poetry is physical, that writing and even publishing are embodied acts.

With that in mind, I'd love to hear more about your process, since your books always read as fully realized, cohesive worlds, the kind I strive for (and at times fall short of creating) in my own work. I'm intrigued by the relationship between the individual poem and the larger manuscript. How do you negotiate the poem and the project, the larger vision? Is it possible to have one without the other? Lastly, how does a given project or manuscript begin for you?

SV: When I was first writing things for the world to see (by which I mean: in my MFA program), I thought on a poem by poem, or even line by line, or word by word level. At this point I think I might feel how you do-- that my books are equivalents of long poems, or, more to the point, are a single word-centered project versus a "collection of poems." I think the word "poetry" is the best thing to call what I am writing these days maybe only because it's not anything else. (Not a story, not an essay, not an article, not straight scholarship, not journalism, not....). I admire that poetry can hold so much, is being asked to hold so much, and that it seems to be easy for it. I am extremely interested in what is often called hybrid or conceptual within the outstandingly elastic abilities of poetry-- these efforts that pose a challenge to the other categories of writing (scholarship, journalism, coding, etc.), asking them to also expand their abilities and considerations and concerns and ways. To democratize, as I believe you said in another interview.

I'd love to hear you speak more about the democratization of writing (scholarly writing about writing), if you're so inclined. I'm also like to know how the instinct to democratize enters your work/career/etc. (Mirzoeff's phrase: "democratizing democracy" is something I've thought a lot about.)

KMD: I love this question. Most of my poems are a (very small) effort to make academic forms of writing more inclusive. Scholarship in the most traditional sense is frequently predicated on acts of exclusion, since most of us can name many things that don't fit within an academic essay: personal experience, aestheticized language, an interrogation of received forms of discourse, experimentation, and the list goes on. In my opinion, many of these things that are excluded from academic writing appear much more often in contemporary women's writing. It is most commonly women's writing that is othered, excluded as non-academic, even irrational. I'm deeply invested in creating a way of using academic forms that is not hostile to women, but rather, allows lived experience, poetic language, and experimentation to compliment and complicate what we think of as rational discourse. In my new book, Fortress, especially, I drew from academic texts like Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, and presented much of the work in footnotes, but my own experience proved central to the discussions of empathy in the book. I think that academic writing is often very personal, whether we like to admit it or not. For me, it's more productive to acknowledge and deal with the ways that different categories of writing, different types of language blur together, rather than trying to maintain a false semblance of clear boundaries.

This interest in democratizing academic writing has shaped most of my career choices, as you suggest in your very perceptive question. I'm active in the small press as a volunteer editor, and have a small press, Noctuary Press. With Noctuary, I try to carve a space for texts that don't fit within the traditional modes of dissemenation, distribution, or even established submission categories. I hope that by publishing uncategorizable texts, I'm playing a small part in expanding what is possible within our thinking about what a text, publisher, or book object can be.

I think that my interest in democratizing academic writing is one of the many reasons I'm so drawn to The End of the Sentimental Journey. It's also beautifully crafted, witty, lively, and engaging. I teach the book in my poetry workshop and my students find it wonderfully refreshing. They often express their surprise that critical writing can be as much fun as poetry, as beautifully written, and as innovative in style. To what extent did you see this creative approach to literary scholarship as a feminist act? How does gender shape the ways that we inhabit academic forms of writing? Is academic writing (and the interrogation of academic forms) linked to larger issues of social justice for you as writer?

SV: I think dismantling anything at all, these days, is my first instinct toward social justice or feminism. I'm also interested in the building--but, cyclical nature of my brain etc.--I've been in dismantle mode for a long time and therefore the dismantling of categories of thought, of writing, of understanding, of power--that is all I seem to want to do. Academic writing is ripe, ripe for implosion and expansion. There is no reason why it shouldn't do more than it does, and do it in more kinds of ways, and there is every reason why it should. Academia, if it is to remain relevant, simply put: needs greater inclusion of women, people of color, queer people, people from different socioeconomic experiences, and people from more parts of the world. This is a longish way of saying that to stay relevant academia needs also to be/think less white, less rich, less male, less heteronormative. Obviously, obviously: what is "academic," what is considered worthy of our study, should be vast and dangerous and offensive, and the language we use to speak about it should not be tamed, not be simply rule-following, and not be simply traditional. If academia can't accommodate this kind of inquiry then it's no longer relevant--just wealthy and self-congratulatory. (Thus, yes, End of the Sentimental Journey-- and everything else I'm reading and working on these days.) This is part of what is interesting to me about the recent wave of creative writing PhD programs-- I have a lot of faith in creative writers' potentials to contaminate academia.

That said, I think journalism and investigative reporting and history, or what we've been calling journalism and investigative reporting and history for a while, are also areas that feel like ours for the taking. Call it documentary, call it political, call it hybrid, call it researched, call it academic-- I've been reading almost exclusively poetry that is engaged with social justice issues of there here and now, and social justice issues as they have resonated historically. And by social justice issues I mean race. I mean gender. I mean capitalism. I mean war machines. I mean oceans dying. I am reading everything I can find in this vein (and there is a lot). Personally, I think these are exciting dismantlings and exciting times for writing (but really bad times for most other things). I can't wait to get old and see all the crazy-good shit this next generation is going to do, but also I don't want to rush it because probably the world is going to end in environmental disaster.

Speaking of which: what crazy-good shit are you working on right now?

KMD: Speaking of feminism, expansion, and social justice... I'm working on a feminist response to/erasure of/reframing of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. The book is a collaboration with visual artist, photographer, and costumer Max Avi Kaplan. The fragmented, elliptical poems in the manuscript recast the narrative from Lo's perspective. As we worked on the book, Max and I also became very interested in themes of disembodiment within Lolita. More often than not, the reader is given only tiny fragments of Lolita, never the full person. We are presented with "a honey colored limb," "knobby knees," a pair of sunglasses. Max's magnificent photographs present their female subject in small fragments, frequently showing her hands trying to escape from rooms, unlocking doors, or dialing a rotary phone. We wanted to call attention to the way Lolita is frequently disembodied, fragmented within the book, but also to empower Lolita, giving voice to a character who is frequently spoken for (in much the same way as Petrarch's Laura). The book, In love with the ghost, is forthcoming from Negative Capability Press in 2015. I hope you'll check it out.

And I'd love to hear about your current projects as well. What can readers look forward to?

SV: I'm working on a few things-- the final revisions of Viability, coming out in 2015 with Penguin; and I've been working on something I imagine will take me years to finish that takes as its center, well, I guess I'm not sure how to talk about it yet-- it's in that long, silently-loud part of becoming something. I'm neck-deep in a few things, I guess. And reading and reading and reading. Researching fetus images in literature and visual art-- so if you know of any....

February 03, 2015

John Gallaher's finely crafted poetry collection, In a Landscape, reads as an exercise in blurring boundaries, an effort to challenge the received models of writing, reading, and authorship that we have become accustomed to. Presented as a book-length sequence of linked lyric pieces, which appear in long, Whitman-esque lines, the work in this stunning new book asks the reader to consider the myriad ways that poetry overlaps and intersects with memoir writing, particularly as Gallaher strives to eliminate any distance between the speaker of the poems and the author. In many ways, Gallaher's work gestures at the artifice inherent in the lyric "I," offering instead poems that allow the reader to observe the inner workings of memory and consciousness experience.

Gallaher's work is perhaps most impressive in moments when he creates an expectation on the part of the reader that the work will read like prose, then proceeds to undermine that readerly expectation. For instance, the work is presented in long lines that look, at first glance, like prose, leading the reader to expect a linear narrative, filled with exposition, that creates an orderly progression from one event to the next. As the poems unfold, one is surprised and delighted to discover the poems' elliptical and associative logic. By creating this provocative relationship between form and content, Gallaher suggests the artifice of the narratives we create to lend a sense of order to the world around us. He writes,

I just forgot how to count Roman numerals, and had to look it up. I used to be good at them, and would always wait for the end of T.V. shows, where I'd get to count the date. The game was: figure out the date before it blinked away...

Here Gallaher presents us with lines that look like prose on the page, but remind us that consciousness and memory are inevitably fragmentary, no matter what narratives we construct around them. In many ways, Gallaher prompts the reader to see the beauty inherent in fragmentation, suggesting that these brief episodic narratives and associative leaps remain closer to the truth than the clear linear progression that one finds so often in prose. In a Landscape is filled with poems like this one, which remind the reader of the artifice inherent in the creation of narrative, which offers only an illusion of wholeness and coherence.

Along these lines, Gallaher's associative and elliptical narratives suggest that consciousness itself is fragmentary, and memory represents only our efforts to lend a sense of continuity to our experience of the world around us. The poems in this carefully crafted collection frequently use the style of the work to make this ambitious philosophical argument, offering the reader a perfect matching of form and content. Consider this passage,

The other night we drove downtown and something was on fire somewhere. We could smell it and see smoke, but we couldn't tell exactly where it was. A little to the east and south of the parking lot, I think?

What's most intriguing about this passage is Gallaher's use of enjambment. By breaking the line after "fire," and beginning next line with "somewhere," Gallaher suggests that the uncertainty and subjectivity of narrative increase as it's made more and more elaborate. This idea comes across most noticeably in the phrase, "A little to the east and south...", which evokes a sense of certainty through its specificity, a sentiment that is undermined as the sentence unfolds in the next line ("of the parking lot, I think?"). I find Gallaher's use of style and technique to convey to evoke the subjectivity and artifice of narrative to be artful and compelling. In short, In a Landscape is a finely crafted book, and a wonderful addition to this writer's already accomplished body of work.

February 02, 2015

Kristina Marie Darling: Your new book, The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 1, offers readers an extended engagement with 1960s mass culture, exploring the myriad ways that television and radio shape the individual consciousness. This idea that culture determines what is possible within thought, and within the human mind, is gracefully enacted in the content of the poems, which appear as pristine couplets. I'm intrigued, though, by moments when the form is broken, and the poems deviate from the pattern that has been established. As the writer, how do you know when a form should be broken? What does breaking form make possible within the content of your work?

Tony Trigilio: Thanks so much for your detailed reading of the book. My hope is that, as you mentioned, readers can identify with the ways mass media and individual consciousness shape each other in the book. As I get deeper into Vol. 2 of the Dark Shadows project (about half-finished with the second volume now), I gain a deeper appreciation of mass media's roots in the verb "to mediate." I realize the connection is obvious: but it's one thing to experience media/mediation intellectually, and an entirely different thing to experience it psychically and viscerally. Like all of us, the development of my own psyche was mediated by electronic communication—for me, it was television and radio, and for folks growing up now, it's digital media. It just so happens that the mediating force for me was a kitschy vampire and all the nightmares he caused me (though I was way too young to understand he was kitschy). As scary as the continual nightmares were, they did introduce me to the power of dream and to the idea that dream-reality is as vital and real as waking-reality.

I appreciate your remarks on the symmetry of the couplets, and, perhaps more important, your remarks about those moments when I break the couplets. For me, the breaking of the couplets creates an asymmetry that speaks back to the formal boundaries I've deliberately imposed on the project. The accumulating couplets lead, for me, to a weirdly discontinuous feeling of finality in each segment of stanzas. By "discontinuous," I mean that each segment of couplets sustains itself until eventually reaching a resolution (the one-line stanzas that break the couplets) that is really not a resolution at all, because, ideally, it resists the expectation for continuously symmetrical couplets. It resists the desire for resolution. My hope is that the one-line stanzas lead the reader to the next segment of couplets as part of an ongoing chain of formal buildup and formal collapse. This dance between structure and collapse offers, for me, an ongoing chain of speech (form) and silence (collapse) always mediated by the white space of the page and the horizontal lines that break up each segment of the book. I'm working with the same couplet structure in Book 2, but I'm also starting to feel like I need to break into a different formal constraint for Book 3. I don't know what form will suggest itself for Book 3 yet.

This tension between speech and silence seems vital to your poems, too. Your work often brings me back to John Cage and his urgent sense of the musicality of silence—really, his adoration of silence as a phenomenon that's just as powerful as sound (and, in the same way, his adoration of noise as a phenomenon just as powerful as music). Whether you're elevating footnotes and indexes from the margin to the center, or whether you're writing haunting silences into the abstract lyric or prose poem, it feels like you want to enact the limits of speech at the same time that you're urgently speaking. Your work reminds me that even though language never gets us to the real thing-in-itself, we absolutely have to keep speaking, because language is our ticket into the cultures we live in, and is our vehicle for re-envisioning the cultures we live in. Can you talk a little about the writers and artists who've influenced your interest in silence? In literary terms, your work evokes Jenny Boully's writing, among others, but the way Cage comes into my mind when I read your work makes me curious about who your influences are from other art forms, too.

KMD: Thank you for your generous and thought-provoking reading of my work. I appreciate what you said about the importance of asymmetry in a text, particularly the ways that such an imbalance (whether formal, visual, or sonic) leaves room for the reader to imagine, speculate, and participate in the process of creating meaning from the text. To forge connections between different elements of the poem. We definitely seem to share an interest in fostering a more active reader, prompting them to inhabit the text and help construct it.

In my own work, I strive for asymmetry of all kinds. This can range from formal imbalances (like footnotes to an absent text, or footnotes that become the main text) to pairings of very different types of language, taken from vastly different registers and discourses. I feel that this kind of asymmetry in a literary work almost always involves silence, a gap between what the writer has articulated and the connections that the reader must forge himself or herself. For me, this silence, this gap in a poem or story is where the reader's imagination lives, it's the aperture where he or she enters the work and begins to interact with it.

My most recent book, Fortress, uses silence perhaps more than any of my other collections. The book begins and ends with erasures of Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, in which I erase human suffering from the book. As you can imagine, there wasn't much left, only "the fragile blue thread," "the small arc," and "hands placed on a piano...remembering a song as though it were another form of breathing." The poems themselves are confined to the margins, made to inhabit the book's least habitable spaces. I'm very interested in the effect that this unwieldy amount of white space has on the reader. I hope that the visual imbalance of the book, in which text is overwhelmed by white space, and sound by silence, prompts the reader to consider the myriad ways that we are coaxed to fill silence, to eventually find beauty in what most would call an absence.

I would have to say that the text that most piqued my curiosity about silence, white space, and erasure was Yedda Morrison's Darkness. She erases people from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, leaving only the natural world in all of its threat, ruination, and majesty. I love the fact that the gesture of erasure becomes as meaningful as the text itself, illuminating and complicating the small fragments with which we are presented. In many ways, meaning resides in what isn't said, in what is taken away. In my own work, I certainly emulate this use of white space and silence to spark the reader's curiosity, to prompt their own imaginative work. Along these lines, Ronald Johnson's Radi Os and Janet Holmes The Ms of My Kin are also favorites, along with Jenny Boully's The Body: An Essay.

While we're on the subject of erasure, silence, and white space, I'd love to hear more about the moments of rupture within your poetry. The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood) is wonderfully cinematic in its presentation, as the poems are presented in discrete episodes, almost like scenes of a television or radio show. I admire the way that the transition from scene to scene, the break in narrative continuity, invites the reader to speculate and imagine in much the same way that incompleteness, white space, or asymmetry would in a literary text. What possibilities does a rupture in the narrative thread open up within your work? By challenging received narrative structures, and the reader's desire for continuity, what other ideas, hierarchies, and assumptions can a poem challenge?

TT: My sense of textual rupture is, I think, much like the excellent way you describe your sense of textual silence—operating as a “gap” in the text “where the reader’s imagination lives.” A ruptured narrative thread offers the reader a chance to participate in shaping a narrative rather than just passively receive the text. My hope is that, as I challenge the reader’s desire for continuity, I’m highlighting the artificial linearity of traditional narrative structures. I’m trying to foreground the constructed-ness of narrative in order to allow maximum space for associative leaps within sections (and between lines and stanzas) of the poem. I really like how your remarks on asymmetry are encouraging me to reflect on the assumptions about narrative and non-linearity that simmer between the lines when I’m writing (not just writing the Dark Shadows poem, but, really, as I write anything). I’m often trying to negotiate new kinds of narrative structures that tell stories through gaps in meaning. I guess I like to take what looks like traditional narrative and reveal—and revel in—what is non-linear and not always rational about the way it unfolds. In my ekphrastic response to the Dark Shadows TV show itself, for instance, I absorb the slow, interminable, episode-by-episode crawl of soap opera narrative (a crawl I enjoy, all the same, as a fan of soap operas) while simultaneously re-imagining this linear narrative crawl in a poem where fragments of autobiographical detail frequently irrupt.

I’m drawn to how this approach disrupts traditionally received hierarchies of narrative. My discontinuities are an effort reveal the seams produced by narrative threads, rather than conceal them as part of a fantasy of wholeness. In doing so, I’m trying to re-think the assumption (a hierarchical assumption that puts the writer above the reader somehow) that narrative only functions as a force that shapes the chaos of experience into digestible linearity. We don’t experience the narratives of our everyday lives this way, and I’m drawn to work that reflects our actual experience—work that allows narrative to emerge as messy, associational, in-progress, and sometimes ruptured.

The roots for this approach to narrative date back, for me, to my discovery of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor comic books, especially how his seemingly mundane, quotidian storytelling becomes associative and moves by implication rather than declarative exposition. But Pekar’s work moves this way only if I’m attentive to the gaps in meaning between panels (like the way white space functions between stanzas in a poem, or the way white space deliberately “imbalances,” as you described it, the written word). I’m drawn to much the same in entirely different writers like Lydia Davis, too. In form and structure, her work unfolds in mini-narratives, of course; but, as one reads her work more closely, the narratives actually emerge in crisply accumulating roundabout moments of thought. I’m drawn to how much her work might look linear on the page, but how her commitment to psychological and phenomenological detail produces narrative momentum that is recursive rather than linear.

I see this same sort of recursive movement in your work, especially in the new book, Fortress, with its sly “minor plots” swerving around, while also propelling, the major plot of the unfolding margins and blank pages (“the book’s least habitable spaces,” as you put it so well in response to my previous question). But the blank pages aren’t just a representation of absence or loss—too much is happening in and around that so-called blankness. The seemingly ancillary text and footnotes instead allow a rich narrative to emerge through distinct objects that function as vital social and psychological markers in the narrative.

I’m fascinated by the weight placed on what could seem like marginal relics or curios in your work—photos, keys, discarded gloves, jewelry, empty bottles, forgotten photos, among others. Amid the silences and textual traces, the actual physical phenomena represented in the poems are intellectually and emotionally crucial to the dramatic situation and to the reader’s experience. I’m especially drawn to what the domestic objects in your poems evoke and reveal about the psyche, and what they permit the psyche to hide. You take mundane, everyday objects and invest them with radiant intellectual and emotional meaning. As I deepen my own commitment to those objects in your texts, and as those objects then become more and more psychologically resonant, I begin thinking of the vital curios that mark the boundaries of the psychic spaces I inhabit myself (those spaces that I inhabit happily, and those that unsettle me). This isn’t just an autobiographical tangent for me, as a reader of your work: instead, it’s a moment when, as you mentioned earlier, the reader becomes an active agent encouraged “to inhabit the text and help construct it.”

Also—and I guess this is related to what domestic objects both reveal and hide—I’m struck by the rich textures of the rooms and homes in your poems. As you write in a particularly tense moment of physicality in Fortress: “the room is multiplied into a house of rooms and the house into a city of houses, the body is carried forward into / civilization” (68). I remember interviewing Nick Twemlow last year, and, during a discussion of how our childhoods influence us, he remarked that every house he remembers from childhood has a unique “tone” of its own. I feel like this could be a description of how you approach rooms and houses in your work: your work sounds out the tone of each space, and it does this through an intense dialogue between silence and speech. Can you talk more about the generative potential of objects, houses, and rooms in your work? I hear the echo of Stein’s cubist-influenced attempt to render the physical world from as many angles of vision as possible—and to make a new kind of coherence from the messy collision of these frames of reference. But I imagine the scope of what you’re doing is wider, and I’d love to hear more about the poetics of space in your work.

KMD: First, thank you for the incredibly generous reading of Fortress. I really appreciate the way you described Lydia Davis's work, suggesting that her "mini-narratives" read as an "accumulation of thought," an effort to create coherence from the disparate (and often very strange) phenomena with which we are presented. I really admire the way Davis calls our attention to the artifice of these narratives. And I agree wholeheartedly that narrative offers the illusion of wholeness, that it feeds into a fantasy of coherence and orderliness that simply doesn't exist in the (often very random and disconnected) world around us.

I see the poetics of space in Fortress as an effort to suggest the myriad ways that the creation of narrative, and the stories we construct in order to link disparate experiences, are much like building a cathedral, a beautiful house, or a room in which to keep various artifacts and mementos. In Swann's Way, Proust describes this as the "enormous edifice of memory," and I love this comparison between the individual's search for order in the world and elaborate architectural structures. We often build beautiful shrines around experiences that are important to us, and more often than not, we use narrative to do this. The creation of narrative becomes an act of both homage and preservation, much like building a sacred architectural space.

When writing Fortress, I was also intrigued by the ways in which objects, mementos and artifacts accumulate much like the narratives we construct around events. In many ways, these objects, these keepsakes are the accumulation of thought that you so eloquently describe in Davis's work. For me, thought and memory are embodied and physically palpable, and I love exploring the implications of memory manifesting in this very tangible way. Because these objects, these mementos are a kind of language unto themselves. They serve as beautiful and emotionally charged signifiers, which represent something purely internal, a memory or emotion that is housed inside the individual subject. When memory is externalized in this way, narrative becomes the link between interior and exterior, between self and world, between internal language and shared culture.

I think this is why I'm so drawn to scholarly forms: the footnote, the glossary, the archival fragment, etc. These fragmented, marginal forms of writing resist the fantasy of narrative cohesion in a way that I find fascinating. But perhaps more importantly, the reader is implicated in this the process of creating a narrative around an event that isn't theirs, a memory that is part of a consciousness other than their own. I love thinking of fragmented forms as bridging the gap between interior and exterior, but also, between self and other. And this is what scholars do so much of the time. They create magnificently cohesive narratives around diary fragments, notebooks, and texts from another temporal moment, artifacts of another consciousness. I'm very interested in the ways the relationship between reader and text doubles back on itself, is mirrored and refracted.

With that in mind, I'd love to hear more about your literary scholarship and the ways in which it informs your poetry. I certainly admire the way you've pursued both very different forms of inquiry with equal precision and dedication. What does your background as a scholar make possible within your poems? Would your poems be possible if you had never written or published scholarly writing? And most importantly, is possible to separate poetry and scholarship? After all, your poems read as gorgeously rendered deconstructions of much of the literary and cultural landscape.

TT: Your excellent description of the poetics of space in Fortress really captures the experience of reading the book—the architecture of narrative functioning as an extension of the architecture of physical space. And I love how the Proust quotation speaks to this relationship between the mind and the tactile world. Thinking of writing in this way makes narrative an experience of fluidity—of “exploring the implications of memory,” as you put it so well. It’s a compelling argument for the generative potential of narrative, where, as readers, we co-create from what is implied, fragmented, and/or absent.

I can see how the process of finding a language for absence owes a debt to scholarly forms, especially considering that contemporary scholarship is understandably skeptical of assertions of self-presence. Thinking more about your question on the influence of my scholarship on my poems, I work from an initial premise that creative writing and scholarly writing are not in opposition to each other. The research and shaping of an argument in a scholarly essay or scholarly book is itself, I think, a creative act. I’m grateful for your kind words about how my scholarship and my poetry overlap each other. My scholarship and my poems are inseparable, even though they almost always work in different registers of language and levels of diction, and they are modes of creation that make each other possible. My background as a scholar helps me understand where intellectual and affective energies can feed each other. While my scholarly training helped me become a better, more complete reader of poetry, it also encouraged me to complicate poetry’s traditional lyric “I” and to challenge, for myself, the primacy of this “I.” Scholarly work on subjectivity creates, for me, a middle-way between contemporary poems that resist selfhood and contemporary poems that celebrate selfhood. I don’t want to abandon the “I,” but instead want to dramatize it within the social and cultural contexts that make it a speaking subject and not a static “I.” I’m most drawn to poems that create a stage for a self whose speech is constructed from a web of complicated, interrelated political and historical forces (my debt to Foucault oozes from every pore of this sentence, I know). Poems such as “Special Prosecutor” and “Autoresponder@whitehouse.gov,” from my first collection, The Lama’s English Lessons, definitely wouldn’t exist in the same way if not for my scholarly research on the way power circulates in written language and speech. Also, my poetry collection Historic Diary might not have been possible without my scholarly background in New Historicism. The book’s title came from the name Lee Harvey Oswald gave to the diary he kept in the USSR. Just the fact that someone might call his/her diary “historic diary” is, for me, a cipher for the productively messy relationship between poetry and history.

I’ve enjoyed our collaborative dialogue, and I’ve learned a lot—especially about the experimental potential of silence, speech, and narrative—from the give-and-take of our discussion of our shared interests. As we approach the end of the interview, I find myself coming back to a question that reaches beyond our specific, individual projects and, more generally, talks about the ways we approach our work. We are both writers who seem to thrive on juggling multiple projects at once, sometimes in multiple genres. I always try to keep in mind that if I don’t work hard to create the day-to-day consistency of a sustained writing practice, I’ll be juggling projects but never actually finishing them. Can you talk a little bit about your work habits—where you write, or how often you write, or maybe what kind of environment you need to write in? I’m drawn to this question, I guess, because I always like to hear fellow writers talk about how deliberate they have to be about carving out writing time. The wonderful paradox I’ve found is that I need disciplined regularity—writing as much as possible in the same location and sometimes at the same time every day—in order to experiment and take wild leaps in the writing itself. It’s something I learned many years ago, when I was a professional musician, and I realized that the discipline of rehearsing several times a week was a requirement to making the kind of music that was constantly full of surprise and that swerved from predictable song structures. The work habits required to make and record music translated naturally to writing habits, even though writing is such a solitary and quieter mode of art-making (of course, it’s noisy in our heads, but I mean that the physical space around us is quieter than, say, a music studio). The process of learning how to create productive work habits as a musician, then, led to a kind of lightbulb moment for me in learning how to create productive work habits as a writer.

I also want to add a final note about how great it is to be a part of the same press as you, BlazeVOX Books. I often say to friends and colleagues that BlazeVOX publisher Geoffrey Gatza has built a press that reminds me of the old SST record label. SST Records took chances with risk-taking music that other labels were too tradition-bound to touch, and their track record with such music was so good that I had to check out everything the label put out. Whether or not I knew the band, I wanted to pay attention if their album came out on SST. As a reader and writer, BlazeVOX means to me what SST once did as a musician.

KMD: I've enjoyed our collaborative dialogue as well, and appreciate your description of scholarship as a middle-ground between "contemporary poems that resist selfhood and contemporary poems that celebrate selfhood." I think this is why I'm so drawn to scholarly forms of writing in poetry, as they allow for a polyphonic text, allowing the same speaker to try on various discourses and registers. For me, scholarly forms, when used in a creative way, can complicate the lyric "I" in a way that I find thought-provoking. Jenny Boully's The Body: An Essay is a great example of this.

And thank you for asking about my work habits. Most of my books wouldn't exist without artist residencies. These literary arts fellowships encourage me to deliberately carve out time in exactly the way you described. This is also where I meet many of my collaborators. What's more, the opportunity to work alongside artists from other disciplines is great for challenging the limitations I tend to impose on my own practice. It's difficult to say something is impossible in poetry when one is surrounded by painters, composers, installations artists, and sculptors, many of whom use text in interesting and surprising ways. For me, all of writing is a collaborative act, and consciousness is essentially dialogic. I think this is why I'm so drawn to working in collaborative, communal settings like Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale, and Yaddo.

BlazeVOX Books has created a kind of community too, and it's been so much fun collaborating with other writers who publish with the press. What could be better than a literary press that not only publishes experimental, innovative, and challenging work, but connects its authors to other writers around the world? It's an honor to be published by the same press as you, and I've also been able to connect with several other writers I admire through BlazeVOX: Susan Lewis, Leah Umansky, and Carlo Matos, to name just a few. I love the sense of community that BlazeVOX creates for its writers.

Let me just say that it's been a pleasure conversing with you. I feel like I've learned so much about your work, my own practice, and the larger literary community. Thank you for a great conversation!

The Stomp (Y Stomp, in Welsh), is the National Poetry Slam of Wales. It is part of the annual Eisteddfod, the national cultural festival of all things Welsh. As I say in “Language Matters,” “It’s a lot like the state fairs in the US, except that instead of prizes for pies or pigs, the prizes are for poetry.”

The first Eisteddfod was in 1176, when Lord Rhys invited poets and musicians from all over the country to compete for a seat at his table. You could sing for your supper, and then get fed. Winning was an entree into the house of the Lords, and a golden meal ticket for the winning poet. The chair you pulled up to the table was a special Bard’s Chair, and to this day, the prize for the winning poet in the Formal Category is a Chair. Hand-carved by an artisan, the winner gets to take the Chair home, sit in it, and write more poems. In Welsh.

For me, as usual, the whole thing started at the Bowery Poetry Club, when we hosted readings by Welsh poets as part of the Peoples Poetry Gatherings, 2002-03. That’s where I began to feel the intensity around this ancient Celtic language. Whenever I bring up Welsh in New York, the response is invariably, “Well, what about Irish?” While the Irish fought and gained political independence, they did so in English. The Irish language is now much more endangered than Welsh. The Welsh never fought for independence, but rather cultural parity, and today Welsh is considered the only endangered language to have come off the endangered language list. It’s a success story by any metric, which is why it got its place in “Language Matters.”

One of the poets I met at the Club is Grahame Davies, who writes in both Welsh and English, and whose work and being was crucial in my decision to study Welsh. Grahame lives the fire and rigor needed to keep this ancient language alive. The fire is contagious, and to prepare for the film, I flew to Wales and began my own formal and informal study of the language.

Grahame picked me up at the Caerdydd (Cardiff) Airport, and we headed for breakfast with Elinor Robson of the Welsh Language Society. I confessed my dream to them, and we all laughed over a full Welsh. What? I, who didn’t even know enough to fly to Manchion (Manchester) to get to Gog Gymru (North Wales), who couldn’t say Blaenau Ffestiniog (the slate-mining town where I live in Wales), let alone spell it, who hadn’t even met Dewi Prysor! was proposing that I participate in next year’s Stomp! I, who didn’t know from “hwyl” (aloha), was going to write and perform a poem in Welsh -- all for this documentary I was making for PBS.

And as you now can see on the front page of the live-stream at PBS.org, the fantasy came real, all duded up in lucky Tibetan cap and Mexican guayabera, taking on all comers at Stomp 2012. “Ladies and Gentlemen! My first line of cynghanedd!” I am saying, to translate the first words of this post. And it really was the first cynghanedd I ever wrote.

In the film, the line is followed by a raucous audience response, Stomp cards held high—unlike the U.S. Slam, at the Stomp the audience is the judge, and they judge by holding up different colored cards to indicate their favorite poet. Watch as I collect a brotherly hug from Dewi, my mentor, friend and Stomp opponent, also an award-winning novelist and Stomp-winning poet, whose current job is translating episodes of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” into Welsh.

The cynghanedd is what separates formal Welsh poetry from free verse; in fact, it is what separates Welsh poetry from any other poetry in the world. There are six different forms of cynghanedd, and to win the Chair, you must write a poem that includes sections written in each. Each form has its own rules, here’s a general description the poetic device Marerid Hopwood, in her handbook Singing in Chains: Listening to Welsh Verse, describes as “consonant chime :” to create a cynghanedd , a line is divided into three sections, a double caesura. The middle section is thrown out. The two sections left, must have all their consonants (except the last) match up. In other words, the vowels, and of course in Welsh, Y and W are always vowels, are immaterial. The sounds we use to make rhymes don’t count.

Now from here things get a little complex. Sometimes there is internal rhyme, sometimes rhyme line-to-line, sometimes both—but let’s just leave it at that. The extraordinary thing is that a Welsh audience can hear the cynghanedd, applauding an especially good one, and be quite aware of a poet trying to slide something by. As an American poet writing in Welsh, even in the Stomp, to come up with a cynghanedd was quite a feat.

(Hopwood’s title is of course a line from “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas. The irony is that while we think of Thomas as the Welsh poet, in Wales he’s often not even considered to be in the top tier. Why? Because he didn’t write in Welsh. In fact, many people think that a lot of Thomas’s power comes from his having heard and digested the sounds and rhythms of Welsh poetry as a youth, and then using these Welsh cynghanedd forms in English. For your further elucidation, another poet who used Welsh forms and sounds was that old Jesuit and inventor of sprung rhythm, Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Quick cut back to breakfast—Grahame and Elinor waving goodbye, I’m training/bussing it to Nant Gwrtheyrn, the Welsh Cultural Center, where I will begin my formal study of Welsh. Flashback to Stanza Poetry Festival in St. Andrews, Scotland, six months before, where another Welsh poet, Sian Melangell Dafydd, replies to my comment that I want to learn Welsh by saying “there’s this magical place in Llyn…” Flash forward to Grahame Davies’ brillant Everything Must Change, a novel that is a mash-up of the Welsh language protests of the 60s with the bio of Simone Weill. Flash further forward to my two weeks’ immersion at Nant where my Welsh teacher Llinos Griffin is prodding the Cymraeg (Welsh language) out of me, saying “You, know, you really should meet Dewi Prysor…”

…And what was your first line of cynghanedd, Bob? you’ve probably been wondering. “Yn ysgwd yn fy esgyrn.” Which, as you can see in “Language Matters,” I learn how to pronounce as I drive our van (my full title: host/driver) through scenic Wales, and which the show’s storyteller/line producer, Sian Taifi, also tries to instill in me by having me sing the words.

Besides Sian, Dewi and Grahame, the film also shows me learning with David Crystal, Europe’s most famous linguist, and Ivor ap Glyn, poet and TV host/producer. The line translates, “I am shaking my bones,” and as you can tell by my rendering, I really was.

The Stomp is a variant of the US Poety Slams, and I’ve done enough Slams to know that grabbing attention at the top is crucial. So I asked Dewi to teach me something that would bust through in case anyone at the Stomp should heckle my mispronunciation or lack of mutations, (Mutations! The bete noir of the Welsh language. Did you notice back a-ways how cynghanedd mutated to gynghanedd? Not a typo! In English and French we often elide one word into another by dropping the last letter: singing to singin’, eg. In Welsh, you “mutate” the first letter of the incoming word, so that, for example, if you are going to Bangor, you would say im Mangor, the B of Bangor mutating to an M. Which of course makes driving in Wales even more fun.) So the title I came up with for my Stomp masterpiece is: Ffwciwch Oma! Dwin Ffwcin Dysgwr Ffwcin Gymraeg! which, lovingly translates to “Fuck Off! I’m a Fuckin’ Welsh Fuckin’ Learner!”

Not only would I be trying to turn my lack of Welsh into an advantage by begging for the sympathy vote, but I’d also be paying homage to the colorful language the Stomp is known for, especially as used so expressively by my mate Prysor and the training camp he established in Blaenau (The Queen), with occasional side trips to Llan (Y Pengwyrn) and Tanygrisiau (Y Tap) -- three major pubs in three parts of town. It’s also worth noting that there are no indigenous curse words in Welsh; like Ffwcin, they’re all borrowings from bully English.

Playing between orality and literacy is one of my favorite areas of poetic exploration. In fact, it was how I got involved with Endangered Languages in the first place. Of the 6000 languages in the world (I just love saying that!), only 700 are written down. The Welsh oral traditions, from the Celitc storytellers and Druid poemmakers all he way to today’s Stomp, has been crucial to the language’s survival. And it was through my investigations into the roots of hiphop poetry (hiphop IS poetry!), that I first came across the Language Crisis.

Having established myself as an appropriately iconoclastic bardd Cymreig in the poem’s title, I felt it was important that the first line of the poem reverse field and show my respect for Welsh culture: “Rwy'n teimlo fel y ddraig goch yng nghanol y frwydr,” imparts to me a mythic status, as I identify with the deepest image of Welsh mythology: “I feel like the Red Dragon entering into battle.” You may have noticed that Wales is the only country with a Red Dragon on its flag: the symbol of Wales, sleeping underground next to the White Dragon (England), waiting only for the Apocalypse to disinter, and then emerge victorious in the ensuing battle royale. Wow.

I straighten out this lie in the next line: “Bardd Americanaidd tumffat yng nghanol y Stomp.” “Actually, I’m just a stupid American poet trying to hold me own in the Stomp.” Another secret of Slam success: flip the script! Set up a high image, and then undercut it with your own vulnerability.

The next lines reference my aforementioned debt to hiphop. Hiphop is part of my lineage, too—for a while there in the 80s my tag was the Plain White Rapper. To write this section took painstaking work at the Blaenau llyfrgell (library) with a correlating a rhyming dictionary and a Welsh-English dictionary—why oh why is there no rhyming Welsh-English Dictionary?

Eisiau ymddiheuriad? dim posibiliad...

Eisiau nghyfeiriad? Dyna ddiffiniad o wrthddywediad

A distrywio’r diffiniad!

My address? The definition of randomness

The contradiction of definition!

Definition Demolition!

This also gives a nod to the course I’ve developed at Columbia, “Exploding Text: Poetry Performance,” using extra-literary means to add even more meanings to a poem via collaborations with film, dance, theater, et al.

After this jangly, dirty, provocative opening, I felt it was time for some “real” poetry, and being a “real” poet myself I knew just what lines to use: steal them, from a couple of great poets.

Hen Gychwr Afon Angau, // mae o’n gwbod

Beth ydwyt ti a minnau, frawd

Ond swp o esgyrn mewn gwisg o gnawd

Old River Boatman Death (Rwilliams Parry), he knows it

What art thou and I, brother But in a uniform batch of bones of flesh

I was truly hoping someone in the audience would out me here (I should have had a plant!), so that my next barrage, taking personal blame not only for my plagerism but also for every crime ever committed during the horrific triumph of Capitalism known as US Imperialism would have more resonance:

Dygwyd y llinellau uchod ar eich cyfer oddi ar

R Williams Parry a TH Parry Williams yn enw

Imperialaeth Americanaidd....!

The lines above stolen on your behalf from R Williams Parry & TH Parry Williams in the name of American Imperialism!

This is followed by the lines from “Language Matters.”

Cynghanedd, defended from the orality of the skalds, has been an integral part of Welsh has survived. Hopwood confesses at one point that she believes you can only truly write cynghanedd in the language that evolved in tandem with the poetic form: Cymraeg (Welsh). In essence, her whole lovely how-to is actually nothing but a piece of propaganda for the perpetuation of Welsh.

Cymru, the Welsh word for Wales, means Us, The People. “Wales” is a Saxon word, what the Saxons, the first conquering invaders of Wales, called the Celts there—“The others,” “Those guys over there.” Isn’t it time for the world’s nations to be known by the name that their people call themselves?

It’s true that my relationship with Welsh is a lot like having a lover—you have to give everything and there’s always more and thank goodness it’s never enough. But my head of dreams – in English I wanted this to be my big head, big enough to hold all these languages and the idea that somehow or other that this piece of theater, sacrificing myself on the pyre that is the Stomp, would show my love and respect for Welsh, that I would go to his extreme in order to bring my own personal touch to a documentary that is all about the essence of humanity, which I believe language is, but which can also be talked about in theories and data where it’s possible human contact may be lost.

Of the 12 poets who made it to the National Poetry Slam, Dewi and I were the first two names out of the hat. We went up against each other, splitting our supporters’ votes, and giving the first round to some brilliant whippersnapper poet who had somehow made cynghanedd a mode of conversation—brilliant! As if Byron were crossed with Frank O’Hara, say.

Because we were knocked out in the first round, the crew was able to shoot a wrap-up, right then and there, full of loss that meant nothing, and surrounded by a language that had taught me important truths that would infuse the whole film. And my life.

After the wrap, the crew really wanted to hit the road. I felt bad—for the poet to leave a reading early is bad form, in any language. But it was already late, and our flight back to the States was at 8:00 the next morning, and we had to drive to Llundain, and the Welsh sky was already ablaze. And my big head was full of big dreams but no way sleeping.

December 02, 2014

I discovered Jenny Zhang about a year ago because her book had just been published by one of my favorite small independent presses, Octopus Books. That book, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find is like a fart joke camouflaged as a refreshing example of modern poetry. I’m not the first to say that some modern poetry is praised purely for being subversive. (flarf, anyone?) However, Zhang’s work is truly revolutionary, but not just for the sake of being so.

Zhang lets everything go in a way that made me feel like I was up to her ear and being fed secrets in the most deliciously impish way. She’s a poet’s poet and touches on everything from the kind of tangible jealousy we can almost taste in our mouths to a virtually comic-book style use of onomatopoeia.

The exaggerated line breaks and seemingly simplistic colloquial tone are without doubt characteristic of many modern poets and can be found here, in I Ate Marigolds.

I Ate Marigolds

I ate Marigolds for attention no one noticed

I was forced to go public people watching themselves as long-

er limbed creatures they have um no beauty

-By Jenny Zhang, from Dear Jenny, We Are All Find

Here’s another favorite:

Anything

your tinny hands are inside tins

I grow as I finish fourth

each de grade action is a great thing

I feel like a great thing

great things are called things and this thing is not inside time which is as tinny as

November 28, 2014

The sexiest word in the language, I think sometimes on lovely days as I walk along tree-lined streets and look at the women in their loose summer frocks, is liquefaction. The word refers to the transformation of a substance from a solid to a liquid state. Robert Herrick (1591-1674), in one of his most beautiful short poems, captures the exact sense of the word that I have in mind.

November 05, 2014

The attacks of September 11th were very difficult for me as they were for many people. It was the last year of my MFA program. In addition to teaching and flying, I was finishing my thesis which was a book length collection of poetry about a flight attendant named Kimberlie.

I was surprised some flight attendants were able to work right away. I was afraid there were going to be more attacks. I took an unpaid week off which the airline allowed us to do without a problem. After a week, I had to go back to work. I was scared and grieving but broke. In the briefing I had with the two other flight attendants prior to our trip, I told them I was scared and it was my first trip back. One of the other young women said, “I’m scared too, it’s my first trip too. My mom is coming on all our flights with us.” Her mom could pass ride space available for free as part of our employee benefits and it wasn’t a problem getting on any of the flights because they were all practically empty. In spite of what anyone may think, I fully admit I was so glad to have a mom there watching over us. The other young woman working with us didn’t seem frightened at all. Her husband was a high school history teacher and the attacks caused him to change his entire course to 9/11 backstory. For the first time in his teaching career, his students were enthralled.

Of course, flying and finishing assignments and my thesis, 9/11 entered the poems. The fear I felt. The images I saw. Very shortly after 9/11, I went to the Hong Kong Ladies’ Night Market where a vendor was selling t-shirts with screened images of the Twin Towers burning right before they collapsed. The shirts were hanging outside his booth, high on display. He saw me looking at them with shock and disgust and he looked at me indignantly as if to say, “That’s right.”

I had scheduled for Eileen Tabios to be the Guest Author in the class I was teaching. She spoke to the class about the difficulty of finding language immediately after a tragedy occurs. Grappling with language myself, all I could see was the image of the dust settling and feel a sense of quiet dislocation. Images without sound. It became the final poem of the collection.

October 20, 2014

Before I launch into the posts, I want to thank The Best American Poetry Blog for giving me this opportunity, and I need to set the posts into the context of the research and writing I am doing about my father, the poet Robert Fitzgerald, whose translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad have been the most clearly recognized American verse translations of the great epic poems for the 20th century. There have been other translations – Lattimore, Lombardi, Fagles to name just a few – but his seem to have stood the test of time in a particular way. More than fifty years later, his translations are still frequently the ones assigned to high school students and undergraduates studying the classic in translation, and a significant swathe of the literary world has remained very aware of his work.

Success and recognition came to my father in the early to mid sixties: he was offered the prestigious position of Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard in 1965, and he taught both there and at Yale until he retired after the publication in 1981 of his late great accomplishment, the translation of Virgil’s Aeneid.

It is the backdrop to this success and recognition, that interests me most of all now, although when I began to think about writing a memoir, the main impulse was a desire to look into my own childhood.

Robert Fitzgerald (c) 1950s, Italy

I was the third in a clutch of six children, five of whom were born and under the age of five in 1953 when we left the United States for Italy, thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship and an advance from the publishers for the translation of The Odyssey. My parents thought we would spend one year there, but Italy turned out to be so much less expensive than the United States that my parents did not return until 1965, and the sixth child was born in Italy in 1955. I lived the twelve years between the age of three and the age of fourteen in Italy, going to Italian schools from kindergarten to seventh grade. I then went to boarding school and college in England. I never attended an American school, coming to the United States only for vacations and then for visits. My formative years as a writer were spent in England, and that is where my novels and stories were first published. I came and settled permanently in the United States after I accepted the position of Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota that I still hold.

As I thought about and sketched out my own memory pieces, however, I found myself growing more and more interested in exploring my father’s background, what had shaped him to become the man and the literary figure he became, the role he played in mid-twentieth century letters, and his friendships with some of its great literary figures – from Ezra Pound to Flannery O’Connor. Perhaps because my own background has been so European, this exploration has become a way for me to also understand and appreciate the more American side of my heritage as well as my literary inheritance.

I have been driven by what I have found among his papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. But my interest in his background started with a visit to Springfield, Illinois, and to the catholic cemetery where many of the Fitzgerald family were buried from the 1870s.

And this is where I start with the posts. I hope you will bear with me, because my original and rather sentimental question about a burial turned into an intriguing and much more complex study of family, class, and life and death in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Plots and Sisters.

I.

The Fitzgerald burial plot is a double just by the main gates, to the right of the office of Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois, with one big salmon-colored rectangular slab of marble placed behind a dozen or so smaller tombstones. Though large, the salmon headstone is not monumental in any way, and is perfectly proportional to the surrounding stones. The names of my great-grandparents and their dates are inscribed in the long side of the rectangle. On the short right side are the dates of one of their sons who died in 1899 at the age of eighteen. Most of the smaller stones bear a name and that person’s dates, but three of them are inscribed simply and in large letters “Grandma”; “Mother”; “Papa.” In front of them is the stone that bears the name Fitzgerald and that shows the boundary of the plot.

The two plots are not tightly packed, and when I stepped into the cemetery office to inquire, the clerk found index cards with the surname Fitzgerald that made clear that one lot of twelve spaces was bought by my great grandfather James and the second by my great-grandmother Nora.

I was in a hurry. I had come to Springfield for a mere twenty-four hours, without even knowing why. It had just seemed absurd that for almost twenty years I should have lived within a day’s drive from where I knew that my father, Robert Fitzgerald, poet and translator, had been born a century ago, and not yet have been there. The final impetus had been given by the installation of a marker to honor him, organized by William Furry, the Director of the Illinois Historical Society and inspired by the suggestion made by the head reference librarian Jim Huston. I had not originally considered including the cemetery in my visit, but was already returning for the second time in less than two days.

We had twenty minutes to spare in the last couple of hours before I had to start the long drive back, before we were to meet with the head librarian in the top floor of a building where earlier in the year a number of boxes had been found that contained files from my grandfather’s legal practice. Among the files of long forgotten cases, there were photographs of my father and his brother, as well as of people Jim and Curtis had not been able to identify, and letters from my great-aunt Agnes. These were letters that my father never saw, that had been hidden in the attic of this office building for ninety years. From those found so far, Jim told me, it was clear that their mother’s sister Agnes took the two boys to the beach for an extended time during the summer of 1916: my father was not yet six, and his brother Monty was three. Their mother Anne had died of puerperal fever ten days after giving birth to Monty, on March 25, 1913.

But Anne was not buried in this plot. Her body was taken back to Albany, New York and buried there. Already the day before, on my first visit to the cemetery, during the first hours of learning so much about my father’s childhood, I had been struck by this fact: she was not buried in the Fitzgerald plot, where by then her father-in-law and three of her husband’s siblings as well as the grandparents were buried. Why? At breakfast that morning I talked it over with Bill and with Jim. Ferrying a body is not easy, I said. There were a number of hoops to jump through: the casket had to be lined in a special way, and pages of paper work had to be filled.

Perhaps in 1913 little paperwork would have been necessary: Bill pointed out that caskets were frequent cargo, stored with luggage. There were even funeral cars on trains, he told me, where a number of caskets would have been picked up and dropped off at stations all across the country.

Whichever way I turned and spun the fact, it continued to strike me as strange. I had always understood that my father’s parents were devoted to each other. I had always known that Robert Emmett Fitzgerald and Anne Stuart had met ‘on the stage,’ children of a middle class solid enough to allow them to be well-educated, and to allow them the early indulgence of acting before my grandfather took up his legal practice. They were engaged a long time before they married, and married in 1905, five years before my father was born, little more than a year after Robert Emmett suffered the severe accident that I remembered, in the language of a child, as being ‘squashed between two tram cars,’ which put a definitive end to a career as an actor, and which would eventually develop into a tubercular hip.

But at the time my father was born the hip had mended, or so everyone thought. I knew Robert Emmett shared a legal practice with his brother Arthur, and I imagined the family was all set to live the peaceful small town life on “aristocracy hill”, on the right side of the railroad tracks, a stone’s throw away from his and Arthur’s mother Nora, who after the death of her husband took over the running of the successful grocery business James had built up since the 1860s; and another long stone’s throw from where Frank Lloyd Wright had recently built a house for one of the wealthiest widows in town. My father Robert was born in October 1910, and by June 1912 Anne was pregnant again.

“Of her death nothing rises from the dark” my father wrote in Animula, a poem from the 1930s. And indeed, how could anything be remembered by the child, who was more than six months away from his third birthday when his mother died? But what about his father, left a widower with a toddler and a baby, who had to move back home to the bustling and fussing housekeeping of his mother? In one of the essays he wrote in the 70s, my father did recall his father’s bouts of drinking between the time of his wife’s death and the death five years later of Monty, the son whose birth had caused the puerperal fever that took her from him.

“…I am sent to fetch him from what I sense to be degrading company -- not very, in fact; only a few men playing poker in a shabby office downtown, with whiskey and syphon bottles beside them.” (A Third Kind of Knowledge, p.5)

Neither father nor son seemed to question the distant and unvisited gravesite. I wondered whether my father’s sense of his mother’s absence ‘removed as by a razor’ could have been multiplied by the absence of a place of mourning, whether his father’s grief would not have found some miserable outlet in visiting her graveside. Are not cemeteries exactly that, places where mourners can carry out the life-long rites of bereavement? There is no benefit to the dead of a place of mourning. But for those living, destined to live afterwards permanently without them, it seemed to me that there is the constant comfort of knowing a stone marks their past existence, their present influence, their future memory.

My father mentions Calvary Cemetery in connection with the progression of his father’s illness which followed quickly his younger brother’s death at five, a victim of the 1918 influenza epidemic that raged around the world as the First World War was coming to an end:

“A polished small coffin took the center of the parlor, and there the small boy lay, turned to pale wax, an utter stranger in his Eton collar. I do not remember what happened at the funeral Mass or what happened at Calvary Cemetery. One day not long afterward my father stayed home with a boil. Since it was not a boil but the sickness of the bone working outward, he never went back to his office, nor to any poker game, nor again to the church or cemetery….” (The Third Kind Of Knowledge, p.10)

In subsequent years, on the regular walks my father took at his father’s insistence, perhaps he did sometimes turn and make his way there, just over two miles due north of 215 Jackson Street, to stand helplessly in front of the salmon-colored rectangle of stone that bore the name Bernard, the nickname Monty, and the pitiful span of years of his only brother. Surely he must have thought of his mother, as well. Could the razor of her absence have made an even deeper cut by the absence of stone and word, Anne Stuart, May 5 1878 -- March 24 1913?

October 13, 2014

On October 9th, about four hundred spectators gathered in The New School’s Auditorium for A Tribute to Mark Strand. Eighteen esteemed poets read from Strand’s work while an overhead projector displayed a slideshow of Mark Strand through the years. The feverish chatter before the reading, and the way Strand was embraced and greeted by friends, family, and fans as he elegantly made his way around the room, made the event seem more like a star-studded reunion than a poetry reading.

Co-hosted by John Beer and Andrew Zawacki (former students of Strand) and presented by the Academy of American Poets, the New School Writing Program, and the Poetry Society of America, the tribute served to honor Strand’s Collected Poems. It was also a belated birthday celebration -- Strand turned 80 on April 11th.

“The added advantage of holding this birthday party now,” Beer said, is that we can identify Mark with the character in one of his poems who says, “though I was over eighty I still had/ A beautiful body.” Strand looked as handsome as he had in his youth, with features strongly resembling Clint Eastwood.

On the stage, the first group of nine poets sat in trios around tables elegantly draped with cream-colored cloth. There would be no intermission as the second group of nine poets switched places with the first as a way of “keeping things whole,” Zawacki said, alluding to the poem by Strand on the program.

Strand’s illustrious career as a poet, prose writer, translator, and editor spans nearly forty years. That he became a poet took him by surprise. Before the age of twenty, he dreamt of becoming a painter.

“I was never much good with language as a child…the idea that I would someday become a poet would have come as a complete shock to everyone in my family,” Strand had said in an interview with Bill Thomas for the Los Angeles Times Magazine.

Before reading Strand’s poem “Luminism,” Edward Hirsch remarked, “Some marvel that one of our greatest poets would have rather been a painter.”

After his student days at Yale and Iowa, Strand went on to become a Fulbright Scholar, a MacArthur Fellow in 1987, the U.S. Poet Laureate in 1990, and a 1999 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Blizzard of One. He has written numerous collections of poetry: Collected Poems (Knopf/Random House, 2014); Almost Invisible (Knopf, 2012); New Selected Poems (Knopf, 2007); Man and Camel (Knopf, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Blizzard of One (Knopf, 1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Dark Harbor (Knopf, 1993); The Continuous Life (Knopf, 1990); Selected Poems (Atheneum, 1980); The Story of Our Lives (Atheneum, 1973); and Reasons for Moving (Atheneum, 1968). He has also published two books of prose, many volumes of translation, and children’s books.

As Strand’s poetry was read, the room reverberated with laughter, contemplative sighs, nods, and at times, exclamations from various members of the audience.

“Mark is one of the funniest poets I’ve ever known,” Carol Muske-Dukes said. Instead of reading one of Strand’s poems, she created a collage of her favorite lines from his poetry. Some lines incited roars of steady laughter, such as “The huge doll of my body refuses to rise./ I am a toy for women.”

“I’m reading to you, Dad,” Jessica Strand said to her father before she read “What It Was.”

Strand received a standing ovation before he took the stage. “I thought maybe fifty people would be here. I never think anybody’s going to show up,” he remarked.

“If I were a poet, those were the poems I would’ve written. If I were a poet who had friends, those are the friends I would have read my poems…But hey, I am a poet!” Strand said, prompting the audience’s laughter.

Strand was as entertaining in person as the speakers he writes in his poetry. “I’m not reading my best poems,” he warned. “My best poems are the ones you will read when you buy my book.”

Before he left the stage, the crowd stood for a second standing ovation and a few members in the front rows sweetly sung “Happy Birthday” to him. Even as the lights in the Auditorium flickered, the night seemed far from over. Everyone stood, patiently waiting to embrace, praise, and speak to him.

“Mark Strand is a world poet and he also has built a world," said Susan Stewart, to introduce her reading of Mark's poems in translation.

Some of Strand’s poems isolate various dimensions of reality. An example is “Reading in Place,” which David Lehman, wearing a stylish striped bowtie for the occasion, read. The poem begins with the narrator asking the reader to imagine a couple looking out at their home, then to imagine a person reading only the beginning of this poem about the couple and filing it away. The person finds the poem years later to read that the couple are “are on their way home, still feeling that nothing is lost, / that they will continue to live harm-free,/ sealed in the twilight’s amber weather.” The speaker asks, “how will the reader know,/ especially now that he puts the poem, without looking,/ back in the book,/ the book where the poet stares at the sky/ and says to a blank page, ‘Where, where in Heaven am I?’”

How lovely would it be to live in suspended bliss feeling as though “nothing is lost,” nor ever will be like the couple in the poem that is never read to the end? Or would it be preferable to be the poet wondering, “Where in Heaven am I?” Why remain suspended like the couple or the reader who never finishes the poem when the real paradise might be whatever we, like the poet, have the power to create on the blank page?

The night showed Strand is not just a star in the literary world; he is truly loved. A Tribute to Mark Strand was evidence that Strand never had to stare at a blank page for very long.

Danielle Elizabeth Chin is an alumna of Marymount Manhattan College and a second-year MFA student in creative writing at The New School. In recent years, she has received The John Costello Award and an Honorable Mention from the American Literary Merit Award for an essay. She has published an original song on the Side B Magazine website. She served as Chapter President of Sigma Tau Delta for two years and is a member of Omicron Delta Kappa and Alpha Chi Honor Societies.

October 12, 2014

(Ed note: This month, Coldfront will publish a wide range of writing in an attempt to capture the spirit of Paul Violi and his writing. Here is part 2.)

Commedia Violi

by Michael Quattrone

Tuesday morning in Putnam Valley, New York:

Population: 9,500Elevation: Infrequent

Paul Violi is standing at his desk in a navy blue, flannel bathrobe and brown, Ecco walking shoes. He has just returned from a driveway jaunt to retrieve the Times, which his wife, Ann, had run over on her way to work. He tosses the paper aside, removes a deerstalker cap and unwinds a wool scarf from his neck.

“It’s windy out,” he reports. He reaches for his coffee, but the mug has vanished. “By the time I find it, it’ll be cold.” Violi has the stoic squint of a movie star. The corners of his mouth draw in when he smirks, or laughs, or grimaces. Disappointed but not flummoxed—or perhaps flummoxed but not truly disappointed—Violi surveys the familiar territory of his workspace.

The poet’s desk is long and narrow, more sideboard than escritoire. Its antique varnished oak bows beneath the weight of books stacked high on either side of Violi’s circa-1985 Wizard™ word processor. Histories on the left side, everything else on the right. Atop a moldering volume of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria sits a bouquet of cigarette butts in a restaurant-style, glass ashtray, and a red plastic lighter on a half-empty soft-pack of Tareyton cigarettes. He proffers one to his guest before lighting up himself, and then leans over the precarious stacks to peer outside. The second-story window reveals a trapezoid of lawn below, badly in need of raking. Violi has decided to wait for all the maple leaves to fall before addressing them, at which point they will likely be covered in snow, and he will have to chop firewood instead. In the distance, a dog barks at the passing of a neighbor’s invisible car; Violi sits.

September 30, 2014

Another quick and impertinent Interviews With Poets before scrambling off to more reading gigs. I’ll be schlepping around for my about-to-be-released book Slant Six from now till December (Columbus, St. Louis, San Antonio, Austin, Miami, etc.). I just read the first review--which was very kind--but the reviewer also seems to think I'm a recovering alcoholic based on a satirical poem called "12 Step." (The poem is written from the point of view of a writer vowing never to write another "personal" poem again). I'm always gobsmacked by what people get out of my poems. A total mystery. But mostly not an unpleasant one. I mean, nice of them to care at all, right?

Speaking of poets we care about, today’s is Matthew Zapruder. Matthew is another poet I’ve known for as far back as my adult memory goes. But I didn’t come to know Matthew well until he invited me to join the Wave Press Poetry Bus Tour that he and Joshua Beckman organized in 2006.

Part Electric Kool Aid, part Bataan death drive, the tale of that two month tour with a clown car full of poets (actually, a biodiesel-fueled motor coach)--reading in bars, bowling alleys and barns all across the US and Canada--is one of those rare moments in poetry history that I believe will be remembered (“They did what?”).

My most emblematic story about Matthew comes from that bus tour, when we’d stopped in Salt Lake City to do a reading. The night before we’d had a raucous gig in Boise, Idaho and everyone on the bus was shagged out, content to make an early evening of it. The fine poetry citizens of Salt Lake had another idea.

We were at a bookstore called Ken Sanders Rare Books. The name conjured a gentleman collector of foxed, 1st editions. We imagined a small audience of well-behaved poetry aficionados and then to bed. What we got was the hairy inch from a bacchanal—heaps of amazing food, wine flowing, 60s era, socialist chanting, singing, and guitars. There were also other “refreshments.”

It was after these that I found myself squinting slack jawed in front of a large, framed illustration hanging on the bookstore wall. Made in the 1940s for a pharmaceutical company, the picture is titled “Germ Isolation In Dingbat Land,” and is a highly detailed cartoon of an adorable germ creature being tortured by a gang of tiny space trolls. It is, to use the parlance of the day, deeply fucked up.

Matthew wandered over to me while I was staring (and staring) at it. We had an intense conversation about how very IMPORTANT the picture was, containing ALL the metaphors for EVERYTHING. It seemed obvious that “Germ Isolation In Dingbat Land” was the “Key To All Mythologies” and Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud” rolled into one.

Then Matthew said, “Erin, you must buy this. You have to. You were destined to have it.”

I do not remember purchasing “Germ Isolation In Dingbat Land,” nor do I remember paying $300 for it (though the signed receipt that arrived with the package does make my case harder to prove). But it now hangs on my kitchen wall, a permanent reminder to Adam that I may not be trusted with the debit card.

Which is to say Matthew has a genius for transmitting his deep enthusiasms and passions, both in his poems and in person. I think part of his gift lies in the fact that he’s not pushy about it. More that Matthew offers gentle revelations, as his poems show us this moment, this thought, this scientific theory, this can of Cocoa Cola, this sound that this bell is (not) making—all of these compel our fullest attention.

The world of Matthew’s poems is shadowed with the unheimliche, though his recognition of these disturbances doesn’t forget what is also charming, sly, humorous, and even sweetly wistful. It is this uncanny quality of attention, the exact gradations in shades between states of human being, that make him an irritatingly difficult poet from which to steal. Lord knows I’ve tried.

And knowing his four, critically-admired, award winning poetry collections well, I am simply left with a strong sense of Matthew’s generosity, his willingness to risk sincerity for the sake of meaningful connections, and the potential for adventure he offers if we’re willing to go on the trip.

So, Matthew, I can tell if someone actually knows you based on whether or not they refer to you as “Matt.”

Why do you hate being called Matt? Don’t you think it’s kind of a sporty alternative to the original, like the ultimate frisbee playing version of yourself?

Also, what’s a nickname of yours that you do like? Please share it with us.

I was called Matt in high school, for some reason. I never liked it, and in fact do hate it. It just sounds so ugly when I think of it in reference to myself. Which is strange, because one of my best friends is a Matt, Rohrer. I like it on him. So to answer your question, if someone calls me Matt it either means they don't know me or knew me in high school. Which is kind of the same thing actually.

Maybe I just like the you in Matthew, it seems communicative, and makes me feel slightly less lonely.

When I went to college, there were a few guys there who were from the greater NY area who seemed to enjoy calling me Mattie, which seemed endearing, like I was their pal from hockey practice. That nickname by the way was solely endemic to that region. I have a few friends who call me "Z" which is fine. I want to say you can call me whatever you want, but that seems potentially dangerous. Nicknames are way too revealing, I don't ever want to actually know what people think of me.

Well, that’s reasonable. I think those of us with non-contractible names suffer from a little nickname envy. Though a number of my grad students call me “Tiny E” after the mini Elvis character on SNL. So my jealousy has been assuaged.

Moving on, you just told me the other day that you guys are about to have a baby. Mazel tov! Really wonderful news. And you especially will be a great dad.

But this made me think of Cate Marvin’s essay about being chosen for a prestigious residency, and when they found out she’d just had a baby, some on the committee were concerned she’d waste her time writing “terrible mother poems.”

Are you concerned parenthood is going to make you write “terrible father” poems? Or are dude poets safe in that regard?

Tiny E. That is awesome. I shudder to think what my grad students call me.

And thanks. Your confidence is much appreciated. I am currently surrounded by baby gear as I'm writing this. I have recently been introduced to the existence of many items that address needs I had no idea existed, and I'm sure this is just the beginning.

You know, in fact I am a bit worried about that. Not because of poems by others I have seen, but because I have a tendency to write out of my own experience, and to find the language within it that seems most potentially electric and luminous and to follow it wherever it goes. That's how I write, and it requires a delicate balance of attention to feelings and weird objectivity toward those feelings, if that makes any sense. Sometimes though I have found that the stronger and more immediate the feelings surrounding the experience (particularly with death), the more difficult it is to have the necessary distance to follow what Stafford called "the golden thread."

In other words I agree with Keats when he wrote that in a great poet a sense of beauty obliterates all consideration. And I get the feeling that having a kid is an intense dose of consideration, and mattering. Which is good. I'm sure there will be nothing I will care more about than the baby and his mother and our little family. So I wonder what that will do to the objectivity of my relation to language in balance with said feelings. I want my experience, however personal, to be representative through the mechanism of our collective consciousness (i.e. language) to as many people as possible. To my mind that happens for poets through the pursuit of "beauty," though of course that term means something very different to each poet.

On the other hand, as I think Montaigne wrote (not that I've read any Montaigne), most of my life has been filled with terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened. So odds are I'm as usual worrying about the wrong thing.

Yeah, well it’s probably just as well Keats didn’t have any kids, saving us all from his “Ode On A Diaper Genie.” But I think kids actually do heighten one’s sense of negative capability, as it certainly puts you in a position of GREAT unknowing. You figure out quickly that grasping after fact and reason is an entirely pointless exercise when it comes to infants.

Next question:

I’m not sure if you remember this, but there was a time when we were reading together years ago and I had a panic attack on stage—wobbling legs, squeaky voice, some hyperventilating—and from the corner of my eye, I saw you reposition your chair near me at the podium in what looked like preparation to break my fall if I did in fact collapse. (This is by far the most gallant gesture anyone has ever made toward me, and is the root of my great affection for you).

But you NEVER seem to sweat behind the podium. Never. Is that because you’re incredibly confident deep down in your soul?

Also, why do you think so many poets are such terrible readers? I mean even poets that you like on the page, and then see them in person and they use the horrible “poetry voice" and mumble, and their poetry patter sucks. Or they natter on for 25 minutes and then read a two minute-long poem. What’s the key to putting on a good performance?

Wow, I totally remember that! We were in Montana, if I'm not mistaken. That was just the insane beginning of what turned out to be a truly insane two months on that Poetry Bus. I can't believe you decided to come along; you are a truly adventurous soul.

It's funny, I think of you as a great reader. You seem to be attentive to the fact that you are in front of an audience. I used to get very nervous when I read, but I did it so many times I think I just got used to it. I still get that feeling of despair and why did I ever leave my house woe, but now it manifests more as a kind of almost total enervation, a desire to sleep for a thousand years that comes on in a very strong way about an hour or so before the reading. Recognizing the feeling and knowing what it is when it's happening helps.

To tell the truth, I think it's natural to have an internal resistance to reading poetry aloud. I think it's a big risk. At first, when I started reading, I was worried about what people thought of me. Now I'm worried about something else. I want something from a reading, a kind of experience, it is probably completely unreasonable, but I want to feel a sort of collective attention, not to me (and in fact when I am reading well the attention really is mostly away from me) but to possibility and to language and to lucid dreaming. And if I am reading and I don't feel that in the room, I have a deep sense of failure. That's a personal thing, it's not really oh they did or didn't like me, but more, I have organized my life around creating this kind of feeling not just in myself, but in others, and if it doesn't work, often for reasons beyond my or anyone else's control, then I get very sad, almost completely depressed.

You are right, a lot of poets are terrible readers. Often they just go on too long, and choose the wrong poems to read. Almost any reading is ok if it's not too long, at least it's interesting. In your example in the question that is a 27 minute reading, which to my mind is pretty long even if there's just one reader. I want there to be a collectively accepted sign to make when someone has gone on too long. Something that starts out gentle, so if someone has just lost track of time they can get a warning and can gracefully call it to a close. Maybe we can work that out at a future AWP. Here's what I suggest: time your reading, and then multiply it times the number of people you are reading with. If the number you get is something horrifying like 190 minutes then you should rethink your set.

As far as negative capability and kids, I think my main task is going to be to minimize the amount of internal irritability with which I reach after fact, reason, and butt wipes. But again, what I think I'm going to have to worry about and what I'm actually going to worry about are surely very different things.

Ah, you are wise to know the difference. And thank you for the compliment on my readings. Once I gave up my last vestiges of personal dignity, it got a lot easier.

And regarding useful signals, I know a writer who ran a reading series who came up with a sure fire solution for willfully long winded readers--she put plants in the audience who’d simultaneously jump up for a standing ovation when blowhard writers went well beyond their allotted time.

It worked pretty brilliantly. Few audience members can resist the social pressure of the standing O. If you wanna try it out at AWP this year, I promise to be the second person on my feet.

Final Question: One of my favorite books of yours is Come On All You Ghosts. Did you watch a lot of Ghost Hunters to prepare for it? Tell us a real life encounter with a ghost you’ve had.

That is a brilliant idea that writer had, passive aggressive standing ovations. And sad that it was necessary to come up with.

I just want to say, I know you are being funny (which you are!), but that thing about giving up personal dignity ... I think there's a deep truth to that. A reading really isn't about the writer. It seems like it is, for a lot of social reasons, but in the end I just don't think that's what makes a really great reading. It is, in a way, about giving up one's own dignity, becoming somehow transparent to the language and ideas. I know that when I have given my very best readings, I feel as if I am just a bit behind the words, almost physically pushing them into the audience, and they arrive there in the room as if they have their own materiality, which of course they do, as sound and then as idea/electrons in the minds of the listeners. I hope when I am reading aloud to be completely forgotten, if I am then I am doing my job well.

I don't watch Ghost Hunters. I've never seen a ghost. I've very occasionally heard voices, which is how I wrote that poem, the title poem of that book: a voice kept saying that phrase in my head, it was as if there was another consciousness with me for several weeks, insisting that I be attentive to something, it took me a while to really listen but when I did the poem came pouring out, not dictated, but as if something had finally been released. That is not how it usually works for me. Which is probably good, because it was more than a little crazy making when it happened. The only other supernatural thing that has happened to me, many times (I would say at least 15 or so) is, I think I see someone on the street, someone I have not heard from or spoken to for many years. Or they come to mind. It's completely unexpected and random, and if I think I've seen them it always turns out it's not them, usually it couldn't be, they live far away. I think huh, that's strange, I thought that was Ben or Olena. And then that person will call or email or something else. It's like a little living pre-shadow, so maybe the opposite of a ghost. As usual, a completely useless power! But a nice one actually.

Thank you, Matthew. This has been a very edifying conversation. And I can’t wait to meet the Li'l Z and see you sporting a BabyBjorn! Very fetching.

September 11, 2014

I have so many poets I wanted to interview that I’m going to have to scramble to get them all in. Too many worthy subjects…

(Update: the kind wizard behind the curtain at Best American Poetry just extended my week blogging to get to them all. Thank you, Benevolent Wizard!).

Today is Cate Marvin.

I can’t remember exactly when I met Cate: a misty recollection--something about us sitting on a bar banquette maybe 12 years ago, with Kevin Prufer as a vaguely alarmed buffer wedged between. I do remember deciding I was going to actively befriend Cate in the most full contact way possible. I loved her attitude. I loved her sunglasses and her “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” t-shirt. In the face of my determination, her resistance was futile.

But before the person, I loved the poems: Cate’s dense, sinuously interwoven stanza structures. The precise, often formal syntax pushed up against subjects full of surprise, startling observations, and dramatic energy. I loved the changeling tension between her poems’ black humor and vulnerability.

Cate’s first book, World’s Tallest Disaster, announced one of those voices you feel is suddenly thrust upon you fully formed, like a late 20th century Athena popped up whole from Zeus’s brain-splitting headache. Cate’s forthcoming collection, Oracle, due from Norton in early 2015, takes that undeniable quality of voice and sends it into hyper drive. Can’t wait to have it in hand.

The following was done in the moments between trying to finish the long lists of things we’re both on deadline for. Cate and I share the attention disorder of habitual over-committers:

Cate, you are known in the poetry world for what some have called “The Marvin Death Stare.” I know your daughter Lucia has inherited this, too. Actually, Lucia’s death stare is even more intense than yours, which is a disconcerting thing to see on the face of an adorable kindergartner.

Where does the death stare come from? How many generations of death-starers are there in your family?

What you refer to as “The Marvin Death Stare” is actually descended from the VanKirk family line. My daughter and I got it from my mother, who can freeze you out with a single look that’ll make your very blood cells tremble. She used to shoot it at me when I was a kid to let me know I'd fucked up. After a while I began to think it was funny. When she tries to use it on me now, I just laugh.

But now that I think about it, my father is capable of giving a pretty evil stare himself. And that makes me recall the very appalling and deadly stare of his mother, which I'd later see in the eyes of my cousin's daughter. So I guess it is in fact genetic.

Half the time, I’m not even aware I'm giving the death stare. I'm probably just in a state of concentration, trying to remember which groceries I need to get. I guess my face takes on that look when I'm concentrating, even when dwelling on the mundane.

It comes in handy, however, if I want to kill someone with a look, someone I deeply despise, and the latest someone was a kid at a birthday party my daughter went to. She was watching my daughter (who was admittedly acting like a total freak) and turned to her friend to mutter, "She's WEIRD." Overhearing this, I focused hard on this child and tried to pour molten lava over her through beaming rays of hate from my eyes. The kid did end up looking a little uncomfortable.

It became apparent that my daughter had inherited the death stare before the age of two. She gave one of her daycare teachers THE LOOK, and then actually rolled her eyes. Total stink-eye. I couldn't believe it. I would have been embarrassed if I hadn’t felt so proud.

This takes me to another thing I wanted to ask you about, i.e. intensity—there’s a dude who a few years back admonished both you and me for turning what he saw as Plath’s influence in our work into a kind of (insert sneer) competency. He was using us an example of writers whose work is promoted by the MFA universe, which is apparently populated by zombies. I got the sneaky feeling hedoesn’t like our poems.

As for myself, whatever else anyone may fairly say sucks about my work, stylistically, thematically, I don’t have much in common with Plath, other than having been born with the same set of parts, a willingness to own anger as a thing human beings feel occasionally, and a female subject position that is sometimes apparent in my work. I’m gonna say it’s a superficial comparison.

But you, Cate Marvin, do recognize Plath’s influence, especially in your forthcoming book Oracle (due from Norton is 2015). You’re definitely having a chat with Sylvia in this next book.

Beyond irritation, how do you respond to the suggestion that we’re both boiled-down Plath made safe for academia?

You know I think that being compared to Plath is a compliment, and I think she would have admired the certain stringency in your work. But you're too pokey and too interested in the daily to be readily compared to Plath. It's funny to find you and me (and Plath!) boiled down in a statement, because this is just the sort of thing you see happen all the time to Sexton and Plath. (Though I am proud to boiled down with you, Erin, in any literary pot, and perhaps this is a recipe Carl could attempt one of these days.)

Now, if you are going to make those kinds of statements, you might just want to sit down and read the work, and maybe think a little bit harder, because it is straight-up obvious that while Plath and Sexton are working some similar angles (along with the other Confessionals) they are VERY DIFFERENT writers. They both get slammed. Plath "strong-arms" the reader. Sexton is "indecent." Basically, these ladies are not very lady-like, and so it seems their work somehow doesn't deserve to be read outside the context of their lives and/or gets thrown into some kind of moral stink-tank where people get their knickers in a twist because someone's writing toward a newness some don't wish to recognize or comprehend.

But I never read the piece you're quoting from. It doesn't actually bother me a whole lot, if at all. I mean: who cares? I guess I have to admit I'm not interested in defending myself from what I guess is maybe an attack, and this is not due to laziness, but rather because I ALWAYS find the whole MFA PROGRAM = BAD conversation really pointless. This is what I think of MFA programs: THANK GOD THEY EXIST. I was a secretary for a year and a half after college, had zero time to write, and was so grateful after that to spend a few years in a place that valued my work and existed as a space specifically created to nurture writers.

I think the term "confessional" is lobbed against women writers in a very predictable manner. If you write something "personal" and it happens to be from a female perspective, it's somehow not "art." Go read Sexton's amazing poem "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Inquire Further." She makes a clean argument, and levels the ground: "My kitchen, your kitchen."

I wasn't aware I'd been boiling down Plath into a "competency." Maybe I have been! All I know if I'm trying to write the best poems I can write. They're not all going to be good. I mean, come on. I'm doing my best here! And I hope my work will continue to test itself and transform over the next few decades as I finish out this here life. I think the thing a poet can most hope for is to be challenged by his/her/their work. I try to be open to what comes, and not worry about the fashions and criticisms that surround me (the living, breathing me)-- as such, I read mostly dead poets. Which may be why I did not know this guy cared about me so much as to detest me. Le sigh.

The truth is I’ve held off from reading Plath deeply over the past decade or more because I’ve recognized that she’s an all too substantial influence on my work. However, there are poems in my forthcoming book, Oracle, that pay homage to her. Some of this is due to a congruence of events that occurred over the past couple of years. First, I went to a Plath Symposium of the U of Indiana in the fall of 2012, and it was thrilling. I felt very connected to her, and to those who love her work. Second, I was teaching her work during the time the Steubenville rape case was so prominent. It then so happened I was asked by the Academy of American Poets to write a poem for the 50th anniversary of Plath’s death. I had a lot of mixed feelings about doing this. But in the end I came to (I hope!) weave together her narrative with the Steubenville case, because I think the scene in The Bell Jar in which Esther is nearly raped feels very contemporary. Oracle also houses a suicide, that of a girl who has been sexually compromised (though this narrative very much lurks at the baseline of the book). Finally, there are poems in the book that I like to think would have cracked Sylvia Plath up. She was one funny motherfucker.

Leaving aside the fact that you just referred to my poems as “pokey,” (LEAVING THIS ASIDE, CATE), I imagine he would say his critique wasn’t intended to be personal. But it does hit me as lazy, in that too many critics feel comfortable having a frame of reference for all of about five to ten women poets throughout history in total. And to actually know Cate Marvin is to like Cate Marvin, of this I feel certain.

Though, it is true, when we first met back in the day, it was me who hit you amiss. (I won’t bring up the touchy subject of the AWP sternum jabbing incident again, though I have Mark Bibbins as a witness if it comes to a deposition). You definitely found me to be an acquired taste.

I find a number of my good female friendships in poetry have started with this thankfully short-lived but wary dynamic. Do you think the business of poetry and publishing pits women against one another? Why or why not?

For the record, I never poked you. You and Bibbins made that shit up. I was raised as way too much of a WASP to even consider touching a stranger, much less poke them in the sternum. (Even while drunk at a bar at AWP.)

But it is true I did not care for you at one time. And that's because people told me you didn't like me! And I was threatened by you, saw you as a rival after you got a job over me, and I really needed to get over myself to recognize that you and I actually had quite a bit in common.

I suspect women can be inclined to hate one another in the manner they hate themselves. I mean, is it not obvious that we are trained to hate ourselves? I used to have the luxury of time to spend a great deal of it depressed, and I would solemnly slog over to Walgreens to buy a stack of women's magazines and a pack of smokes. Then I'd spend the evening reading through these magazines and feel even worse about myself and my entire fucking life. I stopped reading these mags at some point, mostly because they no longer published good articles (it used to be you could find great articles by super smart women on topics like skin creams-- I always loved to see language artfully weave itself around these seemingly inconsequential matters).

So, even prior to having my baby, I opted out. I had this reckoning with myself as a woman in her thirties, and I made myself come to grips with the fact that vanity would not serve me well into my future as an older woman. It had come time for me to recognize I would no longer be the __________ -iest woman in the room. And when women compete with one another we do not serve to improve our situation.

When I had my kid, I was forced to give up my customary evenings of indulgent melancholy. And it was at that time that I saw myself in a larger context, and that context was WOMEN. I saw I had way more in common with women, everywhere I went, as they too were dealing with trying to get the goddamned car-seat snapped into the stroller, they too were sleepless and raccoon-eyed and covered with spit-up . . . and I got over myself. I recognized that the female poets I was most threatened by were exactly the ones with whom I wanted to be in conversation. So, yeah, in that way, I guess, I came to love other women because I finally made peace with myself. I no longer had the time or energy to inwardly project the deep-seated loathing that’s continually funneled through all of us by the media.

Yet I think we're now living and writing in a time in which women just are not as interested in bringing one another down. That we recognize we all have to deal with the same shit, and that by sticking together and talking about it we have a real shot at making the changes we want to see actually happen.

Speaking of women’s magazines, despite you having chucked in the patriarchy's gym towel, you really are the most idiosyncratically stylish woman I know. With the sparkle clogs and boots and the leather jackets and the hyper animated socks paired with really excellent jewelry.

How do you square this with your feminism? Why don’t you do as many other women intellectuals in academia and buy boxy, faux Guatemalan jackets at Chico’s that make your hips look disproportionately wide and be done with it?

Are you, to use the phrase of the moment, a bad feminist?

One of the nice things about being a “woman” is the fact we have so many options available to us as far as fashion is concerned. It’s for this reason I love having a daughter. She really has fun expressing herself through her clothes. And she is an outrageous dresser.

It is part of my feminism – on a purely personal level – that makes me uncomfortable with the idea of wearing skirts, dresses, and any clothes that are “revealing.” I don’t want my body on display. It makes me uncomfortable to attract attention that way. Like I said, that’s just me.

[*Heteronormative Statement Warning*] My boyfriend recently told me he’d like to see me in something other than jeans. Later, he made a suggestion that implied he’d like to see me wear a skirt. And I reacted kind of violently, telling him (true to our times, in a text message): “Okay, I need you to understand something. I don't wear skirts because I don't like them. I don't like wearing them. I don't own any. I don't want to own any. If it's my legs you want to see, you can see them whenever you like in private.”

Then I realized I was being really unnecessarily cranky, so I followed up by saying: “Okay, why don't you show me what you have in mind? I'll try to be open to your ideas.”

And here’s why I love this guy. He says in response: “I don't give a shit what you wear. More teasing than anything. I'll wear the skirt if I can find a nice one.”

I can’t help but appreciate a man who refuses to take his “masculinity” too seriously.

Now, Erin, you’re going to think I’m cranky (and you know how I tend to get cranky about these matters) when I say it is in fact bad feminism to criticize women for shopping at Chico’s. My mom likes to shop there, and there are tons of super badass female academics I know who rock those clothes. So I won’t lower myself, Erin, by taking a cheap shot at that particular genre of fashion, especially because I rather admire it. Wearing clothes that don’t aggressively flatter the body in the way that’s expected strikes me as quite a natural choice. Plus, I’ve been known to shop at Chico’s.

There. I said it.

But there have been times when I have thought that I might want to consider dressing differently, as if it might be in my best interest to consider donning a sort of disguise, so as to be more respected in the workplace. Because I tend to wear a pretty “young” look (jeans, and more jeans): because, yeah, these are the clothes in which I feel most like myself.

The fact is, I’m not terribly imaginative when it comes to fashion. A friend of mine once opened my closet and, on seeing about twenty pairs of matching black clogs, said, “I’m worried about you.” I say, figure out what works for you and buy twenty pairs of it. Buy it in varying shades so no one suspects that you just can’t be bothered to do your laundry.

Simplicity is the key. My first fashion idol was Batgirl. She of the black suit and red hair. All covered up, but shapely, and not to be messed with. Nothing frivolous about her.

Though one thing I love about poets is despite how serious they are about their words, they love THINGS. Show me a poet who doesn’t have some odd collection of brik-a-brac, whether it’s books, jewelry, or furniture. Poets are all about thingyness. We love most the details. And I love that about us.

As for being “good” or “bad”—don’t binaries suck? What’s so goddamn great about Literature is that it resists such categories, as does humanity, inherently.

Feminism? I think one is strongest in their sense of FEMINISM when s/h/ze allows his/her/their idea of it to take different shapes, that is, is willing to allow it to be redefined in conversation with others. The meaning must be shared and, thus, continually altered, to retain meaning. That’s what keeps it alive and necessary for me as just another person trying to navigate this fucked up world on a day-to-day basis.

Wow. That is an incredibly smart, nuanced response, Cate. The only thing I can say at this point is:

HAHAAHAHA, YOU SHOP AT CHICOS!!!

Thank you, Cate Marvin; this has been a very edifying conversation.

I don’t even know who’s up tomorrow. I think Dana Levin. So please tune in because Dana always has a lot of interesting opinions to share.

September 09, 2014

I’ve got a case of the coffee manics as I went to bed at 1:30 (Adam started a late night conversation about popular misreadings of the Daoist gender binary. Sexy!), then woke up at 6 AM as Jude had to be at Cross Country practice because shared suffering and sleep deprivation make you run faster.

Continuing my poetry interviews, today we have Carl Phillips. I’m feeling good about wrangling him into this. Carl’s plenty opinionated, but when the mic goes on he may choose to bound into the forest like the ghost stag of myth and legend.

I met Carl in 1992 when we both began at the Boston University’s poetry program. We’d been hauled in for a mandatory TA meeting, one of those deals where they make you sign in at 8am on a Saturday and hold you prisoner for 6 hours while telling you what a grade book is and going through the sexual harassment policy a syllable at a time.

At some point, after a series of telepathic exchanges, Carl dropped from his seat at the end of a row and signaled in SWAT team fashion that I should follow. I remember this as one of the best afternoons ever—hopping the train (I hadn’t lived outside of Nebraska long and found riding the T to be the height of urban sophistication), and wandering around the Back Bay until settling in at the Ritz Hotel bar to kill four hours. We drank multiple martinis after the established practice of Plath, Sexton, Starbuck, and Lowell, our BU Program poetic elders. We’ve been fast friends ever since.

Carl is a prolific writer, which would be tolerable if the books weren’t individually and collectively brilliant. As a poet and essayist, it’s no exaggeration to say he’s one of the very most influential, critically admired, and important poets of his generation. No one but Carl sounds like Carl. Imitators wash up on the shore of his distinctive extended syntax, his uncanny concretizing of abstract states-of-being, as well as the usefully obsessive, sacred/erotic conundrum that underpins both the poems and the essays (and if you haven’t checked out his brand new essay collection from Graywolf, The Art Of Daring: Risk, Restlessness and Imagination, do yourself a favor and order it now. It’s hawt).

Carl now lives in a beautiful, multi-storied old house in St. Louis. It’s the kind of house that has an inordinate amount of teensy, hidden powder rooms. Apparently a lot of discreet powdering was required of people at the turn of the century. A Cape Cod Yankee at his core, Carl is a ruthless bargain shopper and recently purchased (on deep discount, of course) yet another perfectly distressed leather couch, a testament to his fraught relationship with what he calls his “inner Hemingway”:

So the other day when we were texting (and I still maintain that a transcript of these exchanges would rival the scandal created by Taylor and Burton at their peak), you signed off to go pick up the rotten pears that had fallen from your pear tree.

As I said at the time, even when you’re performing a disgusting yard chore, it still seems sooo exquisitely LYRIC in some ineffable way. I mean, “Ah, the sweetness! The Beauty and Ruin! The bees humming drowsily in the golden nectar…”

Please tell us why your life is more poetic than other peoples’ and how you achieve this effect.

Ha, it only seems more poetic to you because you didn't have your fingers sliding through the rot of pears that looked solid, nor did you see me trying not to scream around all the drunk bees, and then there's the rank smell of a man cleaning his yard in 102 degrees. It's sexy in the movies, but you can't smell the movies...

Eeenteresting. Though if you could smell a movie, which movie would you choose and why?

Instead: you have a potentially death-inducing food allergy (which I will not name here to prevent your enemies from slipping a mickey into your jug wine), and I’ve also seen you throw yourself out of a moving car.

Do you think this predisposition both genetically and spiritually leads to the strong sense of duende that runs through your poems?

"In his brilliant lecture entitled "The Theory and Function of Duende" Federico García Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art. "All that has dark sound has duende", he says, "that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain."

Oh. That.

So glad you sent that to me before I went to the doctor. All these years, and that dark sound in my head is nothing to worry about, just duende...

Hmmm. An artful dodge. Ok. Let’s try this: you, Carl Phillips, contain multitudes. You are an excellent chef, a daring interior designer, a virtuoso accordion player, a gifted roller skater, and a former high school Latin teacher. You are also a man the world identifies as African American. But I know there have been times in the past when you’ve gotten the message from some in the poetry world that you don’t seem “black enough.”

What makes people have those kinds of (as I think of them) totally asinine responses? What’s at the heart of such a response do you think?

I think it comes from an insecurity about identity. And a blurring of identity and the concept of trademark or brand recognition. Insecurity makes people want to narrow the definitions down, when it comes to identity. If there are two many definitions, how is one to choose? The bolder and more intellectually imaginative alternative is to broaden the definition and consider the idea of identity as textured, multi-valenced, various, and to see that variety as exciting rather than intimidating. But the insecure are easily intimidated. We are all of us insecure in our own ways, but that doesn't mean we have to live there...Meanwhile, by narrowing the definition, the definition becomes a label, like a trademark. Gay poetry. Black poetry. Etc. What's too bad is that we minorities already have the problem of being thrown into a single category by the so-called majority. Why compound that by doing it to ourselves?

That is an eloquent answer. Thank you.

But back to my impertinent questions: I have a theory about poetry as self- portraiture based on the movie 101 Dalmatians. You may remember in the opening of that movie, the dog Pongo and his master are sitting at a window watching people walking their dogs in the park. The visual joke is that the dogs and their owners look suspiciously alike, though the people clearly don’t realize this.

Given that you look very much like your dog Ben, and that a strong “The Pets of the Poets” motif is developing through this interview sequence, I think this is an especially good question for you: do you believe that every poem, no matter how close or far way the subject matter appears to be from a writer’s experience is just another self portrait? I wonder because we in contemporary poetry seem awfully anxious about the idea of what the appropriate amount of distance is for a poem to take from the autobiographical.

I think all poems are necessarily and inevitably autobiographical, inasmuch as they come to us only after having passed through the various facets of our own experiences of the world. So everything we write is marked by our sensibility, which itself has been shaped by our experiences, whether lived or read about. Why all the anxiety? Having a poem reflect who we are isn't the same as confessing things we'd prefer to keep private.

Yes, but people still rank on the supposedly “confessional" mode frequently, as if that designator means something in an age when you can google most celebrities’ genitals or your neighbors' amateur porn sites anytime day or night.

So the anxiety about the autobiographical-appearing must come from somewhere outside of this quaint, now mostly absurd notion of confession. I suspect that it’s actually codefor “personal-seeming” and it gets used especially to dismiss poems assigned to a “feminine” way of writing. Do you agree?

I don't know if I've noticed it being a way to dismiss poetry by women in particular. It seems to me that there's a general aversion in the last ten or so years to feeling in poetry. To human feeling. The result is a lot of poems that distance themselves from feeling by being entirely conceptual, mechanistic; I don't know what word is right, here. There's a lot of bloodlessness, I guess, when we are blooded creatures with feelings. That's a general observation...I guess I really don't pay a lot of attention to the noise...

Uh huh. Sure you don’t….

Anyways, final question: so you and I both know you’re kind of obsessed with soup: making soup, eating soup. Today’s soup was Portuguese kale soup. Ninety percent of the time you’re doing something soup-related when I ring you.

Expanding the food universe beyond your obsession with liquids, if you were trying out for MasterChef, what is your piece de resistance dish that would make the cut with Gordon Ramsay?

I'm not kidding about the noise. I follow news, via places like Poetry Daily. And then there's just what I hear from friends. Seriously. I think I value day-to-day peace too much to get caught up in what ultimately just distracts from getting work done...

Gordon Ramsay, there's another example. I didn't know his cookbooks or show until the other day when you mentioned him to me. Truth. Anyway, I'd probably go with. Crab linguine with lemon gremolata...but I can't claim to have invented it, I found it on a food blog. That's how I spend a lot of my time, not on poetry sites, but in food blogs. Food's a lot more essential in the world.

But the food question was just a ruse to find out your fanciest recipe so I can wheedle you into making it when I come to town in October.

And thank you, Carl. This has been a very edifying interview. You’re a peach!

Thanks Erin, I'm so happy to be a peach rather than top banana in the shock dept., to quote Holly Golightly...

Tomorrow tune in for my interview with the delightful Adrian Matejka covering such scintillating topics as the best tattoos of MMA fighters, his failed career as a French horn player, and the deal his workshop once made not to date women writers.

September 08, 2014

When I was thinking about writing for this blog, I was trying to imagine what I’d want to read.

I’d heard pedagogical issues go over well, but the word “pedagogy” makes my legs fall asleep like I’m sitting on a folding chair in a church basement rec room. Also, my students affectionately (?) make fun of my poetry “prompts,” which usually require a 45-minute lecture to set up. There’s a lot of arcane context and emphatic hand gesturing.

So I thought, “What resources do I have for such a blog? What are my skillz?”

Frankly, I have few skillz beyond an early, useless career as a springboard diver, and a gift for finding objects disappeared into the hovel of dog hair and remodeling dust that is presently my house.

But I realize I am rich in friends—accomplished, irritatingly smart and talented poetry friends to be specific. If I could figure out a way to monetize these friendships I would. I’d be the Warren Buffett of poetry.

I decided it’d be fun to have some conversations with these guys in the next few days (so far I’ve pestered Carl Phillips, Dana Levin, James “Jimmy” Kimbrell, Kerry James Evans, Adrian Matejka and Stacey Lynn Brown into plopping their bottoms on the hot seat). Terrance Hayes has sorta committed, but given that our communications typically consist almost entirely of the disturbing, weirdly specific text emojis he sends me, we’ll have to see if that happens.

The only rules I set for the interview are that I would only talk to people I know well enough to ask vaguely pokey, forward, or inappropriate questions. Also, that they should try their hardest to answer spontaneously. No sitting around editing for hours. It is understood that all are poets I admire because how can you be actual friends with a writer if you don’t respect their work? You’d either have to wear your love goggles all the time, which ends up strangling your brain, or else you have a friendship based on lying and that’s too uncomfortable.

Pandora Boxx (L) and Mark Bibbins (R) share a vestibule

First up is Mark Bibbins, whose recent book, They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full(Copper Canyon), is one of the very best poetry collections I’ve read in years. The book is both generous-hearted and critically astringent, full of saber-toothed wit and language play paired with a deeply ethical, empathetic political consciousness that never belly flops into polemic or preaching. Seriously, you should read this book.

In person, Mark, despite turning up with the odd, not-really-explained broken bone from time to time, is the guy who arrives at his elegance without you ever seeing the gears of the machine whirring. He’s a man who really knows how to wear a shirt. When he makes you lunch, it appears that he’s doing nothing for two hours but farting around with the stereo and chasing his affection-harassed cats up and down the apartment. Then somehow, miraculously, he sets the most perfectly dressed, chilled lobster salad with little buttery slices of crostini in front of you, paired with a bottle of wine you’ve never heard of but that makes your life better in every way. I have known Mark since about 1995 when we met at a gay writers conference in Boston. We have been AWP roommates annually ever since:

One of the things I’ve always noticed about you, Mark, is that while you are a person with a clear sense of aesthetics, a person with opinions, a political person in your own way, and you’ve been in the writing world for a long time, you still manage to be well regarded and liked by pretty much every writer I know. With this description in mind, what are your rules for living in the Lit world, which can be such an understandably insecure, gossipy environment. What is your personal ethic about the business and life of writing?

Excuse me: "pretty much"? You sure know how to twist the knife, Erin. It's otherwise a sweet and generous question, but I'm afraid answering it will undermine the last twenty years of coldhearted strategizing and furtive betrayals upon which my empire rests.

There, maybe I've stumbled on my first rule: Try to maintain a sense of humor. I don't know that some of the other rules I've (often inadvertently) followed—be patient, don't imagine anyone owes you anything—even amount to good advice these days. It certainly seems like advice fewer and fewer people are hardwired to heed. And I admit I don't know what "the Lit world" is/means; from what I can tell there are many such worlds, usually coexisting, sometimes competing. Is that your sense too, or does it seem more monolithic to you?

To me the contemporary poetry world seems a bit like a fire ant pile, where you can see the single dirt mound at the top, but beneath it there are tons of separate little alleys. I mean, if some fascist regime were to take over, and assuming poets would still have the honor of being the first ones up against the wall, I have a hard time imagining the men with guns going, “Ok. So are you more of an alternative poetics type? Flarf? Confessional? Newly Gnostic? Did you go to Buffalo or Denver? How do you feel about Mary Oliver? Were you ever a fellow at Sewanee? Tell us which one of these three quotes is by Yvor Winters...”

Which is to say I think we all have a lot more in common than we like to let on. But camps create ever more opportunity for hierarchies and “branding.” I mean, there are obviously real aesthetic and intellectual issues people care about, too, but I can’t ever imagine fighting over them. Fighting over poetics feels like putting Nair in the shampoo bottle of a girl some boy you like has his eye on. It’s not going to make him like you more if you screw up her wig. I guess I just go to the mattresses over other issues.

NEXT QUESTION: Every time I tell you how much I love the final poem in your new book (They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full), which is a brilliant, political, meta rule-smashing, funny, finger-wagging manifesto of a poem, you get uncomfortable and sheepish and kind of half disown it while struggling with the pleasure of the compliment. Beyond your fetching modesty, why does that poem make you uncomfortable?

Good point about the anthill; my sense of our variety is most likely a delusion. Part of what makes me apprehensive about "A Small Gesture of Gratitude" is that it reminds me that I am ridiculously fragile—I can't watch TV news for five minutes without my blood pressure spiking (with Fox News it takes ten seconds, if that). There’s a flaw in my constitution that keeps me from participating in certain kinds of activism, so I avail myself of the more homeopathic possibilities that poetry affords. I frequently write in response to things that provoke or annoy me, but the sense of irritation seems rather high-pitched and raw in that poem—less transformed than what I usually aim for. In a lot of ways I'm a private person (another delusion, I realize), so seeing my thin skin stretched across several pages makes me anxious.

Don't you experience a similar uneasiness with some of your own work? I'm thinking of "Poem of Philosophical and Parental Conundrums Written in an Election Year," which is one of the powerhouses of Slant Six, and which you've referred to as a "rant." In the Venn diagram of our poetic projects, I think it and "A Small Gesture of Gratitude" are partying together where the circles overlap.

That sounds about right. I love to see poets put their consciousness on the rack and give it a good stretch. Not so comfortable to be the one doing it, of course. Though I have come to sort of enjoy that form of spiritual masochism. I remember seeing Vito Acconci, the early, groundbreaking performance artist, when I was a kid in college, and the powerful sense of attraction/repulsion I experienced through his art’s illusion of truthfulness and vulnerability left a very lasting impression. I like art to be excruciating generally, no matter what the subject.

With “Poem of Philosophical and Political Conundrums Written in an Election Year” I struggle with all the voices that frequently come into the room when I sit down to work. As in, “Who fucking cares about parenting issues? Serious poets don’t write about parenting.” Which is not how I feel when OTHER people write artfully about children and parenting, but after all this time I still feel afraid that I’ll be dismissed for my subjects. A case of “Physician, heal thyself,” I suppose. Do as I say, not as I do.

Speaking of parenting issues, and segueing like an eighteen wheeler, you have an inordinate fondness for pets, and for cats particularly. Like, I remember coming back to the room at AWP a couple years ago to find you lying in bed, watching cat videos online just to calm yourself in the maelstrom. Are cats your totem animal? Whence your obsession with kittays?

Oh my, if excruciating art is your thing, you should definitely check out the documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. It's as touching as it is harrowing, and should put some of those faculty meetings in perspective—or maybe vice versa. (I haven't been to any of your faculty meetings.)

The Bibbins cats: The Pagoda (l) and Anchor (r).

If I remember that AWP correctly, I had broken my wrist a couple of months prior and was emerging from a haze of painkillers; cats facilitate various kinds of reentry. I grew up in a very creature-friendly household, and with the exception of a couple of grim years in the late ’80s, have always lived with at least one pet. Cats and dogs I adore equally, but when I first moved to Manhattan in ’91 I was going to school and working full time, so keeping a doggie seemed unfair and impractical, not to mention against the terms of my lease. Some buildings allow no pets whatsoever—who would want to live among all those petless people? If I'm ever around someone who says "I hate cats," I get away from them immediately and stay away, although I guess I can sympathize (begrudgingly) with people who are terribly allergic and have thus been denied the pleasures of feline company. It's old news, but you can gather a lot of useful information about people when you see how they treat animals and waitstaff. I could be remembering it wrong, but I think there's a scene in Jurassic Park where, even as the raptors have been merrily ripping half the cast to shreds, one of the characters says something like, "You still don't see them screwing each other over for a buck."

You probably saw this thing recently where some asshole CEO lost his job when footage of him kicking a dog wound up all over the internet. People were outraged—rightly so, and fuck that guy forever—and yet the even greater horror of factory farming continues apace. The vile abattoir owners and their lobbyists have also been getting our craptastic politicians to pass "Ag Gag" laws to criminalize the activities of investigative journalists and other whistleblowers.

Maybe here I can swerve to a question about the dumb prohibition against political poetry. Does it function as a kind of literary “Ag Gag” rule? Do you think poetry would be better off if poets ignored that prohibition, as they seem to be doing more and more successfully, or should everyone just stick to trees and urns?

I think American poets were oversold a bill of goods with the whole “art for art’s sake” notion. I understand this was an overcorrection for past aesthetic crimes that didn’t honor the poem for the artful, mysterious construct in language that a good poem always will be. But we as a country have often enjoyed the lucky, relative isolation of our geography, and our military and economic dominance have insured a kind of “What? Me Worry?” approach in mainstream poetics for many years.

But then the political poem may be one of the most difficult poems to write well. To have it not turn into propaganda, to avoid preaching to the converted. Hard row to hoe. But more folks seem to be taking up this task in recent years, and there were always American poets who ignored the memo about political poetry. The tradition was a smaller but important one.

Last question: You’re kind of a club kid deep down in your wee heart. If you were to put a super group of poets together, based on how their poems would translate into music, who would be in it and what instrument would they play?

I like that question, and I'll use it as an excuse to bust out the phrase "Mina Loy on keytar" at long last, but I'm sort of going to dodge it—maybe people will rise to the challenge and leave their own answers in the comments!

When you mentioned all the wee tunnels under the poetic anthill earlier, it reminded me of the labels for subgenres of electronic music that critics/bloggers have come up with during the last fifteen years or so—IDM, minimal techno, progressive house, drum and bass, dubstep, big beat, glitch, electronica, etc. etc. etc. If none of this music is your bag, it's easy to dismiss it all as "techno," just as you can remain blissfully oblivious to the distinctions between New York School and New Formalism if you don't care about poetry and/or are fixing to execute the poets.

When you talk about assembling a band, I'm reminded of how prickly we can get concerning affiliations and allegiances and communities—I feel like a lot of poets are in favor of the idea of community until they spot one that they feel excludes them. Poetry, the cliché goes, is art that people make on their own; a lot of us would secretly prefer to be in rock bands, although I don't know what this proves about poets, because so would a lot of bankers. Perhaps it speaks less to an interest in community per se than to an interest in groupies, leather pants, and having one's wildest catering demands fulfilled.

As technology (the internet in particular) has enabled poets to branch out and collaborate in new ways, it's also made it more practical and affordable for musicians to record and produce things by themselves. Projects by artists like Burial and Kathleen Hanna and Peaches are instructive concerning the value of privacy and autonomy in a business that typically demands the forfeiture of both. So here we all are, as ever, greening after someone else's grass.

Can we end with a poem, as well as a reminder that we have elections coming up in two months, and that it's important to register and vote? We were talking about your "Poem of Philosophical and Parental Conundrums Written in an Election Year" before, so I'm going to request that one.

What a terrific politician you would be! Rejecting the premise AND flattering the interviewer! Well done, Mr. Clinton.

Thank you for your time, Mark Bibbins. A very edifying conversation.

Next up tomorrow, Carl Phillips on race, Gordon Ramsay and yard work.

Note: due to the fact that the technology gods hate me, the link to “Poem Of Philosophical Conundrums…” is not yet functioning. I know. I know. You wonder how you will sleep tonight. If I can fix this, I’ll post it later…

June 27, 2014

On February 15, 1971, I receive a telegram—a real telegram with teletype pasted onto yellow Western Union paper—announcing my acceptance into David Ignatow’s Craft of Poetry workshop at the 92nd Street Y. This will be my first workshop. I don’t know much about Ignatow—I applied because a friend said her brother was excited to have a chance to study with him (he didn’t get in)—and I buy two of his books. As I devour Ignatow’s colloquial poems of bagels and bums, apples and America, his laments of love and life, I feel a too-good-to-be-true nervousness.

I am overmatched. Many of the others have published, and they speak a lingo I don’t know. But I come to learn that Hitchcock selecting you for “Kayak” does not mean being cast in a suspense movie set on a tiny boat, but rather having George Hitchcock publish your poem in his literary magazine. The turning point comes when I bring a poem to workshop about a character named Harvey. After I read it, Ignatow says, “You know what William Carlos Williams would have said about that poem: ‘So you know Harvey, well then TELL me about him.’”

Not only do I have a mentor in David Ignatow, but I have William Carlos Williams as a “grandmentor.”

David and I keep in touch, and he is generous with his feedback and support, until the magazine I co-edit rejects a story by his wife, which David hand-delivered to me and I said I liked. David sends me a postcard with the salutation “Dear Nobody.” He accuses me of promising acceptance of his wife’s story so I could get an interview with him, then betraying him. He declares that I “have no guts,” repeats that I am a Nobody, and concludes with “we will never speak again.”

I am devastated by the vitriol yet amazed that I am Somebody enough for him to call a Nobody.

I remember that I have the phone number of a young writer David thought I should meet. I haven’t gotten around to following up, but I don’t know where else to turn, so I call. She sounds happy to hear from me, and I blurt out what’s happened and read her David’s postcard. She is as bewildered as I am, and says, “He always talked about you like a son.”

Can it be this simple: I rebelled against Daddy by making Mommy mad at him?

I write David a letter, apologizing for the misunderstanding but pointing out that I never said we would publish the story—just that I like it—and he gave me the story at the last of our interview sessions. David responds that he assured his wife of an acceptance because he thought I was in charge. He accepts my apology and closes with, “We will never speak of this.”

I am relieved but wonder if I will ever again be embraced by David. I next see him at a literary event and shyly approach his circle. David puts his arm around me and says to the others, “Alan and I have been through some things.”

I am considering graduate school, and I ask David if I can audit his MFA workshop at Columbia. (Many years later I will be in the administrative position of turning down such requests out of hand.) David agrees on the condition that I not submit poems to the workshop, speak during class, or see him during office hours. For me, this couldn’t be any more ideal.

I contentedly sit slightly away from the table, soaking up everything without concern at being judged. Not sure if David has officially received permission, I don’t tell anyone I am auditing. A few weeks into the term, David points to me and says, “Alan is an editor of a very important new magazine”—perhaps he has noticed that the other students go off to bars and cafes without inviting me. After class, I am asked along to the West End.

Good teaching means knowing what to say, when to say it, and how to say it. Here’s an example of good teaching. David solicits some of my poems for a section he is editing for The American Poetry Review. He sends my stuff back because “you’re moving very fast and I want to catch you at your best,” asking me to submit new material just at the deadline. How clever: I don’t feel rejected, and I start to write like a maniac. I don’t know how long I will be “moving very fast,” and I don’t want to miss a minute of it. At the deadline, I submit and he accepts.

A couple of years later, I send David the proposed manuscript for my first full-length collection, and he replies, “I don’t think you have a complete book in this ms.” He names 21 poems that “could form the beginning of an excellent book, if you can be patient and continue to write to match these.” I am patient, and the book gets better.

I rely on David’s opinions of my work, so it is distressing when I send him a batch of pieces and he writes back: “With the exception of two poems, none of these strike me as very good.” A few days later I receive an addendum: “I’m sorry to have written you in haste. I was tired that day and low about most things but this morning the poems struck me much more intensely.”

I get a note from David telling me he is working on a new book: “So you’ll find my head buried in the typewriter next time we meet. It’ll be like I’m wearing a typewriter for a hat.”

I picture David writing the first sentence and grinning as the hat image comes to him, continuing to type with utter pleasure.

David gives a reading to a packed auditorium at the Guggenheim Museum. At the reception, I am too shy to wedge my way close to him. One by one, the crowd disperses, until it is just the two of us. I walk with David out into the frigid, sleeting February night and accompany him down Fifth Avenue, looking for a bus stop.

I say, “It’s quite a compliment that so many people came out to see you in this miserable weather.”

“Yes, I’ll have to remember that in my will.”

We cross slushy Fifth Avenue. David lets a bus go by as we talk. “There are a lot of people who care about your work, and you,” I say, my way of telling David that I care about his work, and him.

“Sometimes I forget that.”

While David is living in Jamaica, Queens, I have dinner with him in a Chinese restaurant. After dinner, David shops at a grocery store and pays with a twenty-dollar bill. The clerk examines the bill closely, back and forth, and after it passes inspection he apologizes.

“That’s all right,” David says. “It’s not my money, I just pass it along.”

Eventually, I become director of the undergraduate program at Columbia, where David now teaches. David calls to ask if he can reschedule a class, several weeks in advance. “Of course. You didn’t have to ask,” I say, to which David replies, “I always check with the boss.” One August, David—now in his late 70’s—calls to tell me he has Parkinson’s and will not be able to teach anymore because of the strain of the commute from East Hampton. “I’m sorry this happened,” I say. “Something had to happen.” “Well, how do you feel?” “I imagine the way Mr. Parkinson did.”

The last time I see David, he is in the hospital and he is dying. He asks me if he can teach next semester, and for a second I think he is delusional, but then he grins.

He tells me, “I like your gray hair. It looks good on you,” and I reply that I like the beard he has growing in. “I’ll ask Rose,” he replies, referring to his dead wife, and once again I think he might be delusional, until I realize he is not talking about now or here. David asks me scratch an itch on his head, and then he falls asleep. I take out one of his books from my bag to show his nurse, to make sure she knows whom she is caring for. David wakes up and sees her holding it. “That’s my latest book.”

When I get the news that David has died, I remember when he recited one of his poems at the beginning of a session at the 92nd Street Y, so long ago: “Ignatow is dying / and so is the sun.” We stared at him, waiting for the rest of the poem. That was it. David shrugged and said, “Hey, I got it published.”

Since David’s death, I have kept a wary eye on the sun.

^^^

JOEL OPPENHEIMER

Joel Oppenheimer’s private workshop, in 1972, meets on the lower floor of his duplex in Westbeth, the former Bell Telephone building (on the corners of West and Bethune) converted to artists housing. At the first session, I read a poem called “Things to do Today”:

This is a reporton the shape of the communeat the present time:The dishes need to be washedand the candle on the kitchen tableis almost burnt out; the laundrythat has just been washedneeds to be folded and put away;it’s stuffy, the windows need to beopened, and Nancy, looking sad,needs to be talked tobefore she leaves for the weekend.

Joel responds “That’s where I live!” and I am off and running.

At a later class, all I have is a 21-word poem. I am embarrassed by its brevity and explicitness. Hoping there won’t be time for me, I comment more than usual on my classmates’ poems. But Joel calls on me. I am always amazed at how Joel can come up with ways to discuss a poem—questions to ask, comments to make—but what can even he possibly say about this one? I read the poem and cringe.

WHEN

When was the last timeyou said I love youbefore I didor touched my penisbefore it was hard?

“Alan,” he says, then repeats, “Alan.” He shakes his head and calls up the stairs to his wife: “Helen, you’ve got to hear this!” She isn’t there. Joel says he has no suggestions, the poem is perfect. “Leave me a copy to show Helen.”

Could there possibly be a less erudite, more nonspecific response to a piece of writing? Could a writer dream of a better critique?

A year later, we meet up again at the City College graduate writing program. Joel says his goal is to separate the “tummler” (Yiddish for an entertainer who “makes a racket”) from the “poet” in me. On one of my breakthrough poems he suggests only that I add a “you” (I do) and delete a “so” (I don’t), but his comment on the bottom of the page is crucial: “Good—it works—the old problem we talked about, i think you’re getting to it more & more.” On another poem he writes: “Will this ever get written properly? i mean, it’s okay now, but you know it ain’t down yet. Have you tried this as a story?”

He is teaching the poet along with the poem.

In class, Joel reads us a poem a former lover has written about him, in which he is described as the ugliest man on earth. He couldn’t be more proud.

^^^

KURT VONNEGUT

I have been admitted to the City College graduate writing program as a poet, but I convince the director to let me also take Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction workshop.

The class meets in Kurt’s midtown Manhattan townhouse. A few sessions into the term, Kurt tells us that his writing isn’t going well and he needs to take a week off. He looks pale and dispirited as he explains that he is trying to write about heaven and can’t figure out how to do it. Two weeks later, when I ask how the writing is going, he smiles, waves his thumb like a flag, and says, “A-number one.” He looks terrific. (His depiction of heaven doesn’t appear until a few years later, in the prologue to Jailbird.) I write a short story about rock musicians. Kurt thinks it should be a novel. “Are you going to settle for easy victories, be happy with an ‘A’ in Creative Writing?” he asks me. I would be thrilled with an “A” in Creative Writing from Kurt Vonnegut, but I say I’ll give it a go. Kurt replies that I shouldn’t agree so fast: “Telling you to write a novel is like telling you to get married.” Every couple of weeks we have a one-on-one meeting. Kurt usually says something before we even sit down: “You’re on to something,” and, later in the term, “You’re racking right along. It looks like a book.” The supreme compliment comes when he declares that in addition to being a poet I am “becoming a man of letters.”After reading a new chapter, Kurt says, “These guys are trouble, get rid of them,” about two of the protagonist’s band members. I assume he is speaking to me as the author, and I am ready to expunge the characters, but he clarifies that he is talking through me to the protagonist, who should fire them in the story. I leave feeling great. I am creating characters. My momentum is strong, and Kurt invites me to meet with him after the term ends. A couple of weeks go by, and I muster the courage to call for an appointment. His wife answers and tells me, “The term is over, he’s not seeing any students.” Before I can plead my case, Kurt comes on an extension and says, “It’s all right.” At our meeting, Kurt asks, “Do you know famous rock musicians?” “Not famous ones.” “Huh?”

Kurt explains that some kid in the Midwest will read my book and become a famous rock musician, emulating my characters because that’s all he knows about how a rock musician acts. Then kids will emulate him. I am not only creating characters, I am creating people. I ask how his book is going, and he replies, “It doesn’t much matter. It’s not going very well.” I can take this two ways: 1) If Kurt Vonnegut has such doubts, who am I to even try to get into the game? Or, 2) The fact that I, too, have such doubts doesn’t mean I am not worthy of being in the game. I opt for the latter.

At the end of the session, Kurt inscribes my copy of Breakfast of Champions: “For Alan Ziegler, who has begun a book of his own.”

I never finish that novel, but fifteen years later my manuscript of short stories wins a minor award, and I am happy with this collection of “small victories.” I send Kurt the manuscript, and ask for a blurb, figuring I am probably the tenth writer that week to ask him for one—all with connections less tenuous than mine—and that he has probably long ago forgotten me. I include a return postcard, asking him to check one of five boxes: “I will try to take a look at the manuscript and maybe write a blurb.” “No, but try again with the galleys.” “No.” “Yes, but be patient.” “It’s done. Here’s the blurb.” A week later, the postcard comes back. Kurt has checked the “be patient” box and added, “Just got back from England, so have to catch up on a lot of stuff.” But in the same batch of mail is an envelope with his blurb, which is prefaced by: “I’m honored to know you.” Likewise, I am most sure.

^^^

WILLIAM BURROUGHS

William Burroughs has just moved back to New York from London, and it is amazing to see Old Bull Lee in the flesh, much less have him as a teacher at City College in the Spring of 1974. He agrees to do an independent study with me, and he gives me permission to tape his undergraduate lectures (which he delivers from typed pages). The first time I put my tape recorder on his table, I ask him to release the pause button when he starts talking so I won’t disturb him. Bill declines, preferring that I do it: “I don’t like to fool with other people’s machines.” We meet at Bill’s sparsely furnished downtown loft. Usually, he wears a tie. Once, when I arrive he is sitting at a big table typing on an old Underwood; later, he has a new IBM electric. He serves me coffee and our conversations are dominated by intense caesuras. At our final session, I show him part of the novel-in-progress about rock musicians I worked on with Kurt Vonnegut. He quietly reads the piece while I talk with James Grauerholz about small presses. Bill pats his front shirt pocket, making contact with a pack of cigarettes, but he doesn’t take one. Finally, Bill says, “It’s very, very good. Polished.” He pauses, and I wait for “but.” Instead, he adds, “Do you have an agent?” “No,” I reply, my heart beginning to race toward the finish line of a novel with blurbs by Vonnegut and Burroughs. Bill starts coughing and says, “You really need codeine for a cough, but you need a prescription.” (The journalist in me recognizes the lead: “William Burroughs can’t get codeine without a prescription.”) “I know some rock musicians,” he says. “David Bowie.” “What do you think of him?” I ask, realizing that the lesson is over. “Cold and purposeful,” Burroughs replies. “I also know Jagger. He’s a nice guy and a smart businessman.” We talk about Kerouac and Neal Cassidy. Bill tells me that Naked Lunch originated as a series of letters. He signs my copy of The Wild Boys: “For Alan, from the Wild Boys.” As I am leaving, Bill says I should feel free to return. “I’m here in the afternoon.”

^^^

Earlier versions of these pieces appeared in The Writing Workshop Note Book (Soft Skull).